Night Shift @ ACORN (9/23/09)

The leaves are tumbling off the Shady Oak like a political version of a simultaneous attack of mildew, black spot, canker, fireblight, and the Titanian mold.  First it was the Census Bureau dumping them (thus signficantly damaging Donk prospects of gerrymandering themselves into permanent power), followed by their funding being axed in the Senate and then the House.

Now the Internal Revenue Police has followed suit:

The IRS says it is severing ties with ACORN, the community activist group involved in a scandal after employees were caught on video giving [criminal] advice to a couple posing as a prostitute and pimp.

The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday it would no longer include ACORN in its volunteer tax assistance program. The program offered free tax advice to about three million low- and moderate-income tax filers this spring.

This, of course, begs the question of how the IRP ever got mixed up with ACORN in the first place.  What is even more pertinent in my mind is how they're going to expand their secret police portfolio into BarryCare enforcement without their helpful nut operatives.  They may have "seen enough" now, but if Red Barry's fortunes somehow flip back and he gets some or all of his leftwing extremist agenda through, even the IRP is going to need the comparatively inexpensive army of cheats, crooks, and fixers that only ACORN can provide.

Keep this file open.

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Oh, fishizzle, I can't make head or tail of ACORN's scattershot PR strategy anymore - though reportedly they do have one.  "Confuse 'em"?  Your guess is as good as mine.

The more-fun-than-a-barrel-of-monkeys part is, Bertha doesn't have any more idea of what she's doing than the rest of us:

In one fell swoop, the lawsuit (a) gives Fox a reason to keep covering the story, (b) presents a thorny legal issue that’ll attract media to the scandal who might not otherwise have touched it, and (c) makes ACORN look like they’re trying to punish people who exposed taxpayer-funded corruption....

Remember, Bertha Lewis told CNN she was grateful to O’Keefe et al. for rooting out those “few bad apples"....

No word on the damages they’re seeking but the AP says it’s in the multi-millions....

My guess is that this is just an arm of their new PR offensive, aimed at proving that the group’s still alive and kicking and ready to rally the left to its side before it gets defunded, but if even Barney Frank’s ready to flush the toilet, the prognosis of success is grim.

I get the feeling that no member or element of the Left that's running away from ACORN like their hair was on fire is doing so permanently.  Dems know how dependent upon ACORN their party is, up to and including King Hussein.  But Bertha got so brazen and wreckless and let things get so out of hand that she's left her employers no other choice.  And brothers and sisters, if Barney Frank, the, um, "man" who once allowed a gay prostitution operation to be run out of his Georgetown basement, is cutting his losses on them, "too far" means somewhere the other side of the next galaxy.

Shooting the messenger may be the ACORN way, but that avails them nothing if they're out of ammunition.

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Today's exit quotation:

Turns out there isn’t [shadowy conservative network behind O'Keefe and Giles], but let’s say there had been. Let’s say Breitbart, Glenn Beck, and Roger Ailes had masterminded the whole thing and bankrolled it with a grant from Heritage or some other right-wing think tank. So what? How does that “complicate” the fact that they’ve got ACORN people on video conspiring to cover up child sex slavery?....[and] why wasn’t conservative big media involved? This is the sort of thing that made 60 Minutes a top ten show on television for decades.