Franken And ACORN

Here's that magic vote #60 for the Dems in the Senate:

The Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of a tight U.S. Senate race over Republican Norm Coleman, which should give Democrats the 60-seat majority they need to overcome procedural obstacles and push through their agenda.

Coleman has said in published reports he is unlikely to appeal the state court's decision to the federal courts. Under state law, the court's decision gives Franken the right to occupy the seat, which has been up for grabs since last November's election.

Minnesota Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty has said he will certify the election winner based on what the state court decides.

I think this has been a foregone conclusion for a while now.  In terms of the Senate, it's technically the #60, but in reality there are a couple of RINOs that usually vote with the Dems anyway, so it's not as big a deal as it might first seem.

Funny thing, though - Coleman won the vote on election night, but with each successive recount, Franken got votes.  I think this raises an interesting question: why is it that every time there's a recount in a major election, it's always the left-most candidate who nets more new votes than the right-most candidate?  The Wall Street Journal reveals the story behind the story:

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel's findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn't demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn't lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire's team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn't been counted, setting off a hunt for "new" Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she'd discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

So, the reality we now face is that election fraudsters like ACORN now have a tried and true method of stealing elections, and they've employed it successfully at least twice.  How's that RICO investigation coming along?

Speaking of ACORN, they've expanded their activities from simply stealing elections to outright thuggery and intimidation:

ACORN, which played a starring role in creating the subprime mortgage crisis, plans to add insult to injury by harassing lenders across the nation with protests tomorrow in an effort to coerce them into supporting President Obama's Making Home Affordable foreclosure-avoidance program.

Austin King, director of ACORN Financial Justice, sent out a press release today advising of the demonstrations that are planned as part of its "Homewrecker 4" campaign. The four financial companies targeted are Goldman Sachs, HomEq Servicing, American Home Mortgage, and OneWest. Read the whole document here.

ACORN plans to hit Dallas, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, New York City, Wilmington (Del.), Columbus (Ohio), Houston, Little Rock, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Seattle.

But let's not forget that ACORN helped to cause the mortgage bubble by strongarming banks into making loans they shouldn't have. And cheering them on was ACORN's lawyer, Barack Obama, who contributed to the increasingly hostile environment for banks when he represented plaintiffs in the 1995 class action lawsuit Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank.

Millions of Americans are losing their homes and neighborhoods and the economy are in ruins because of groups like ACORN that interfere with markets and force banks to do stupid things.

And ACORN too has taken in millions of dollars in taxpayer funding and is utterly unaccountable. The group even covered up a million dollar embezzlement for eight years.

And from thuggery, they've moved on to obstruction of justice:

Is the radical leftist group ACORN squelching voices that dare to criticize it?

That's the distinct impression House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-Michigan) left last week when he told the Washington Times that he wasn't proceeding with an investigation of ACORN because "the powers that be decided against it."

Conyers refused to explain who "the powers" might be, but his spokesman Jonathan Godfrey twisted himself into a pretzel trying to spin the statement. The congressman was referring to himself as "the powers that be," Godfrey claimed.

Not that this is news to anyone who had their eyes open during the campaign and election season (see the bottom right of this blog for plenty of Obama-ACORN links).  Oh, by the way, the links between ACORN and Conyers' own obstruction of justice are pretty ironclad, but I'll address that in a future post.

Meanwhile, isn't it great to know that this group of 'community organizers' hasn't let up on their efforts to...um...'organize' communities after putting their man in the White House?  I suppose that's only natural, since Obama's jobs-producing 'stimulus' put billions of dollars into their coffers.  Just wait until the illegal immigration issue comes up again.  ACORN will be front and center, 'organizing' communities all across the nation...

There's my two cents.