The 2,100 dodgy registrations in Lake County sounds pretty damning. But to truly assess the performance of ACORN which could result in having all federal funding pulled, you need to look at national numbers. Otherwise, it's cherry picking.

All contract awards such as this are based on cherry picking. I'm sure 99% of the time Blackwater actions are fine, it's the other 1% that mean taxpayer money shouldn't be used.

If ACORN's performance nationally is as bad as in Lake County, then I agree with you, it doesn't sound like they deserve to have their grants renewed. However, this wouldn't require an act of Congress. Certainly there are performance standards and a review board that would do that.

It's not about ACORN, it's about the House having the ability to prevent companies with a proven record of internal mismanagement from receiving tax payer funds.

While I don't think ACORN should receive taxpayer funds, they would be far down on my list of companies that should not receive said funds.

My in-laws are in a business providing food services to large disaster relief efforts, like big fires. They get federal government contracts, not unlike ACORN. They have a daunting set of criteria they need to meet every step of the way. They have inspectors turn up unannounced. If they slip on standards, their status gets demoted.

The standards are very different. Providing disaster relief is held to a higher standard, mistakes by your in-laws could result in people dieing. Nothing that ACORN does has that level of ramification.

I can't imagine that ACORN's grants are administered any differently. Given that, it does beg the question, if ACORN is so objectively bad, then why isn't some review board handling this? Why does it require grandstanding in Congress?

Politicians and grandstanding. Really, does more need to be written about this?

My suspicion is that ACORN's performance is not actually that bad. But you're welcome to correct me on that with a link showing their national performance standards.

-- paulpsd7

It has become pretty bad lately, and what is worse is they knew they were under scrutiny, and screwed up anyway. I find most of the legal action against ACORN to be nothing but smoke. When someone is charged because they registered 3 felons in 300 people, that's bullshit. If ACORN is charged because they allowed felons to register people, that's bullshit as well.

There's lots of bullshit that is thrown out about ACORN, but they still need to clean up their registration act to receive Federal funding.

Xanthro-Their voter registrations percent of fraud is beyond high. ACORN has received government grants and funds to help with this voter registration, and ACORN has done worse than any other organization ever in the regards as to percentage of registrations turned in that are fake.

Link, please?

I'm not quite sure what you are tying to say. ACORN recently has had exceedingly high levels of fake registrations turned in. It's hit 90%+ in some areas, and we are taking about thousands of registrations.

Link, please?

Seriously, did you miss the

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/09/acorn.fraud.claims/index.html

And in Lake County, home to the long-depressed steel town of Gary, the bipartisan Elections Board has stopped processing a stack of about 5,000 applications delivered just before the October 6 registration deadline after the first 2,100 turned out to be phony.

As I stated in the thread you quoted, that's not 2,100 out of 5,000. It's 2,100 out of the first 2,100 were phony.

Last time I looked, 2,100 out of 2,100 is 100%, and 100% is greater than 90%. Find a single organization ever that has managed to turn in 2,100 out of 2,100 phony registrations.