Bizarre Attorney General Behavior

Scandal plagued ACORN has been having government contracts canceled left and right and for good reason:

After a series of undercover videos surfaced showing ACORN employees giving advice to conservative activists posing as a prostitute and a pimp, opponents in Congress have sought to cut the group’s sources of federal money. In recent weeks, both the U.S. Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service have also ended partnerships with ACORN.

But, in a bizarre turn of events, New Mexico's Attorney General Gary King puts out a press release celebrating his "A" rating from this scandal plagued organization:

“I’m pleased to be recognized with a good grade. We were happy to meet with ACORN to discuss the foreclosure crisis and outline our thoughts for supporting legislation that protects consumers from predatory lending practices that have contributed to the crisis,” says Attorney General King. “We will continue to advocate for stronger consumer protection laws in New Mexico that can help prevent and mitigate the effects of foreclosure.”

He wants to meet and work with an organization that helps devise tax avoiding schemes for pimps looking to expand their underage slave trade? Even for New Mexico this is too much. I sincerely hope we have someone else looking at running for Attorney General. It could be a Republican. It could be a Democrat. It could be an Independent. Just please, someone with an iota of commonsense.

Update: Oops, my bad. I guess I should have looked at the date of the press release on the Attorney General's website (thanks, Mike). In all fairness to AG Gary King, his embracing of ACORN comes from prior to their outing for advising assumed prostitutes and pimps. It goes back to the days when they were only known for voter fraud, dissing the disabled and intimidation. My sincere apologies.

A World Turned Upside Down

Today marks the eighth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. It is a day that should always serve as a reminder of two irrefutable facts:

1. There are people in this world that hate America and the freedom it represents, and would do anything to destroy us.
2. There are unsung heroes that everyday put their lives on the line to safeguard our communities.
   

Let me first acknowledge that second point by thanking the firefighters and police officers that step up everyday when no one is looking to protect and to serve. Thanks for what you do.

As to the first point, I can't help but be concerned about the direction our country is heading. On 9/11, the terrorists failed to destroy America, but since that time, a greater and greater number of those elected to lead our country have made, and are making, decisions that might well accomplish what the terrorists failed to do those eight years ago.

On a state level, we've seen indictment after indictment against our elected officials. Yet, rather than outrage, the citizens of the state seem willing to accept this as just the way things are. Even the recent fleeing from the scene of an accident by the Governor and his staff is just seen as just another news story:

The state's boating law says the operator of a vessel has 48 hours to provide information about an accident, and Condit complied with that, according to Jodi McGinnis Porter, spokeswoman for the energy and minerals agency.

Porter said Fay, the boat's owner, stayed at the scene and provided information to investigators, while Richardson, Condit, Miller and the state police officers left. They were not required to remain there, she said.

What's been largely missing from this discussion is not what is legal, but what is ethical. Legally, the perpetrators of the accident may not have been required to remain at the scene of the accident, but ethically, they should have remained.

Think about it.

There are only two reasons that the Governor and his staff fled. First, there was alcohol involved, and it would have been determined that a crime had been committed. Or second, they wanted to avoid the unfolding public relations nightmare that would have been made worse by having their pictures taken at the scene of the accident. I'm reasonably confident that if cell phone records were checked, one of the individuals in the party will be shown to have called for advice on whether or not they "had" to remain at the scene of the accident.

There is always a lot of gratuitous talk about the need to legislate ethics in this state. But, this is just another example of why you can't legislate ethics. Unethical people will act in their own self-interests, and the shrewdly unethical will do it in within the letter of the law. You probably also noticed that not one Democrat running to lead our state in 2010 condemned the blatantly unethical act committed by Governor Richardson and his staff.

Speaking of speaking out, Representative Joe Wilson is in trouble for breaking with decorum by shouting out that the President of the United States was lying to the American people while giving his healthcare address. Yet, there was much truth to Representative Wilson's accusations:

A GAO report finds that illegal immigrants constitute more than one-third of all Medicaid-funded pregnancies in California. Elsewhere in the country, the GAO found: "From 1992 to 1995 in Texas, the number of Medicaid-funded births to undocumented alien mothers more than doubled, while the total number of births remained fairly stable." People respond to economic incentives. Even when the people and the incentives are illegal.

Missouri attorney general Chris Koster has estimated that one in ten Medicaid claims is fraudulent. How much of that fraud diverts money to illegal immigrants? Nobody knows for sure and don't ask the state bureaucrats for help in finding out: When the federal government passed new rules demanding better documentation of legal residency for Medicaid recipients, the states resisted. In California, officials representing the state's Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, wanted to use such lamentably inadequate documentation as insurance records and school report cards in place of passports and birth certificates. We are entitled to question their motives, and their prudence.

So, Representative Wilson could use a visit from Miss Manners. But he is telling the truth, and President Obama is not.

Of course, President Obama's dishonesty on this topic is not limited to the question of whether or not illegal immigrants will benefit from the healthcare changes being proposed. There were numerous inaccuracies his speech. For example, take this:

OBAMA: "Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have."

THE FACTS: That's correct, as far as it goes. But neither can the plan guarantee that people can keep their current coverage. Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and they'd be free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like, or drop insurance altogether. The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the health care bill written by House Democrats and said that by 2016 some 3 million people who now have employer-based care would lose it because their employers would decide to stop offering it.

In the past Obama repeatedly said, "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period." Now he's stopping short of that unconditional guarantee by saying nothing in the plan "requires" any change.

Considering how much effort goes into writing a presidential speech, these careful manipulations of the English language cannot be considered accidental. Again, we deal with a question of ethics. Is it ethical to put something forward as factually truthful that is actually intended to deceive?

Of course, these unethical manipulations of language are not limited to our elected officials. They are also being used by "community organizations" to confuse the issues. Consider this taken directly from the ACORN site:

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.

In illegal circles, what ACORN is describing is called money laundering. Organized crime has been doing this for years. In the case of organized crime, dollars from an illegal activity, take prostitution as an example, are flowed through a third party entity before making its way to a "legitimate" business. In this way, the business has deniability about the illegal source of the funds. Much the same way as ACORN has deniability about the federal source of its funding.

As long as we're on the topic of federal funding, ACORN and prostitution, you might want to consider this:

Two staff members of the Baltimore office of ACORN were fired Thursday after they were captured on hidden camera appearing to give advice on evading tax laws to a man and woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute.

The video depicts a man and a scantily dressed female partner visiting the Charles Village office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, where they appear to ask two employees about how to shield their work from state and federal tax requirements. The supposed pimp also appears to ask the employees how to conceal underage girls from El Salvador brought into the country illegally to work for him.

"If they don't have Social Security numbers, you don't have to worry about them," the employee says.

If you haven't seen the videos, I strongly urge you to watch them. It's like watching an SNL skit from when SNL was actually funny.





Of course, the only problem is that this isn't a comedy skit. It's actually real. Now, factor in the economy, our increasingly uncompetitive educational system, the ever-growing size of government, and the you'll see why I'm so concerned that America may be doing to herself what the terrorists failed to do on 9/11.

Waiting for the Iglesias's Ad

Joel Gay put up an article today in which he acknowledges the fireworks have begun in the 1st Congressional District race between Darren White and Martin Heinrich. And, by fireworks he means the negative ads.

If you think the race for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District seems quieter than anticipated, you’re not alone. What was widely expected to be a barn-burner has largely been a snoozer. The candidates have kept relatively low profiles and the airwaves have been largely devoid of their names and faces.

That’s started to change, with Republican Darren White and Democrat Martin Heinrich trading blows over debate schedules, resumes and flip-flops on various policies. And just this week, White came out with the first negative ad.

Hmm, Joel, you might want to go back and review the ad releases dates. I'm pretty sure that Mr. Heinrich beat Darren in the "first negative ad" category. There was that embarrassingly cheesy hit piece that Mr. Heinrich put out a couple of weeks ago, and there was at least on other one before that. Although, on second thought that first ad I'm recalling may have been paid for by the DCCC, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the Heinrich campaign - just like Martin Heinrich didn't really need to register as a lobbyist when he was lobbying.

But, I will agree with your assessment that the negative ads are going to start to fly now from both camps. In fact, I couldn't help but notice that David Iglesias was back in the news:

"Looking back on all of this, in hindsight, I wish the department had not gone down this road," he said. He said he would not have included on the dismissal list U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, who has said he was pressured over a corruption investigation.

Of course, we all know that the "pressure" that David Iglesias received was not over a corruption investigation (he would have been required to report that - kind of the requirement to report you're a lobbyist], but the pressure was about his unwillingness to prosecute ACORN's fraudulent voter registration election cycle after election cycle.

You probably have noticed the result of Mr. Iglesias ongoing failure to prosecute has embolden the organization. ACORN is now acting in such a fraudulently criminal manner that even the Democratic Bernalillo County Clerk has had to call in to question their practices - something Mr. Iglesias never had the stomach for.

Such is the situation for Bernalillo County, which reported, the day before Obama’s Española rally, that it had received 1,100 fraudulent voter-registration cards. While there is no information, yet, on where those cards came from, Matthew Henderson, ACORN’s New Mexico head organizer, acknowledges some could have come from his group. ACORN, he says, has registered 75,000 New Mexicans during this election cycle. While the group separates suspect forms into a separate stack, he says, it’s ultimately up to county clerks to decide which are valid.

In the case of Bernalillo, County Clerk Maggie Toulouse-Oliver notified the district attorney, Attorney General and US Attorney Offices about the bogus voter-registration cards. “If they want to conduct an investigation,” she says, “that’s their prerogative.”

Now, I've got a prediction. I'm willing to bet that Heinrich's campaign (or it's alter ego, the DCCC) will put out an ad trying to link Darren White to David Iglesias as Election Day gets closer. Heck, they'll probably even use an article the Albuquerque Journal published on April 15, 2007, which places Darren White at a meeting with the Department of Justice during the 2006 election cycle. Of course, there would be one problem with that tactic...

FOR THE RECORD: This story has been corrected to reflect that Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White met with Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in Washington in 2005 — not in 2006.

Now, if I know the record has been corrected, we know that Martin Heinrich and his alter ego the DCCC know that it's been corrected. The question is will they let the truth get in their way? You know, like the truth about needing to register as a lobbyist when you're lobbying.

Busy Season for the Attorney General

This should be a busy election season for Attorney General Gary King. He has already had to push the Secretary of State to act on Eli Lee's creatively questionable use of not for profits, and now it remains to be seen whether he will begin investigations in the other efforts going on in New Mexico to undermine our elections.

I have long held that we don't need to create ethics laws. We just need to enforce the laws on the books, and I believe it is up to the Attorney General to put partisanship aside (justice is neither Republican nor Democrat) and fully prosecute those who break the law.

Dave Maass of the Santa Fe Reporter has a recent article about PRC candidate Jerome Block Jr. writing check after check to a county clerk:

The money in the fund comes from inspection fees placed on utilities and a tax on insurance premiums. In other words, publicly-financed candidates receive their money from the state government.

In Block’s case, some of it ended up in the San Miguel County Clerk’s Office.

According to Block’s campaign records, a few days after the June 3 primary election, Block cut a $300 check to San Miguel County Clerk “Pecos” Paul Maez for “campaign coordination.”

San Miguel is the only county Block won in the six-way Democratic primary. Block used Maez’ official clerk’s office address on the report.

That same day, Block also cut a $2,500 check to the country-western band Wyld Country, in which Maez is a guitarist. According to Block’s campaign, the payment was for a rally in San Miguel County just prior to the primary election. Block deferred questions to his recently appointed campaign manager Jonathan Valdez.

Block used nearly 10% of his taxpayer funded (not government funded Mr. Maass) campaign funds to write checks to the county clerk in the only county he actually won in a primary. If this doesn't scream for an investigation by the Attorney General, then I don't know what does.

Oh wait. I do know something else that is just as atrocious...

Election season after election season the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) gets a pass as it strives to undermine the election system by paying people to turn in fraudulent voter registrations or intimidate voters. And, Scott Sandlin's recent article shows that this year is no different:

Clovis native Rebecca Sitterly registered to vote soon after returning to her native state in 1979 and jumped right into Democratic politics about the same time.

So the former Bernalillo County district judge was surprised to get a July 3 call from a community nonprofit that was checking on her new registration.

When Sitterly said she hadn't filled out a registration form � indeed, she'd been regularly voting in the same place on Mountain Road NW in Albuquerque for nearly 20 years � a supervisor with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now promised to destroy the card, Sitterly said in a phone interview.

"He said, 'Don't worry, it won't go anywhere,' " she said.

More surprises were in store. She got a call from the Bureau of Elections in the Bernalillo County Clerk's Office three weeks later, asking again about the registration card, which was missing its required Social Security number.

"They were finishing out the card � they weren't calling about the fraud," she said.

Sitterly went to the sixth-floor clerk's office, got a copy of the card and discovered that it understated her age by three decades.

So, let's review, shall we?

We have a "former" Democratic political consultant, Eli Lee, running not for profits and pledging to spend a million tax deductible dollars to "educate" voters. We have a Democratic candidate for the PRC [side note: there is no Republican in this race, so I don't have a partisan motive here] writing big checks to sitting county clerks to help him win the election. And, we have ACORN continuing their well documented efforts to pay good money to submit fraudulent voter registration forms in an effort to undermine the election process.

My only question... When is someone going to jail?

ACORN's Aggressive Use of Intimidation Tactics

We've had a lot of experience in New Mexico with the criminal activities of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN. Due to New Mexico's role as a swing state, ACORN operatives are already generating more than their fair share of complaints for legally questionable tactics in this election cycle:

Association of Community Organizations for Reform, more commonly known as ACORN. The group has been actively trying to register voters in Doña Ana County in recent months. It has also received national attention in recent years for allegations in other states of voter fraud and shoddy work, which you can read about from CBS News by clicking here and FOX News by clicking here.

Of course, a quick internet search shows that the aggressive and criminally questionable tactics used by ACORN in New Mexico are nothing compared to the intimidation and misinformation strategies employed by ACORN in states that allow ballot initiatives. Watch the videos below to see ACORN in action...