I only watched part of the first video due to time constraints, but it sounded like they were giving that fake pimp pretty good advice.

OK I've watched more and I have some thoughts.

First off, in all but one case the advice they're giving is really not too bad. They basically advise the pimp and his ho to pay their income taxes, and tell them how to do that without admitting exactly what they're doing. Sure it's a little shady but realistically what are they supposed to do? I guess you could tell them "pimping is wrong", but then they're not going to listen to you and you've accomplished nothing. At least this way they're getting advice on how pay tax on their illegally obtained money.

The one case that's disturbing is when he asks about smuggling in 13 Bolivian kids or something like that and the advisor basically says if they're earning money you better not tell anyone. If she was telling them that in earnest, it would be some fucked up shit, no question. But the serious question is whether or not she was telling them that in earnest.

There are actually a lot of strong reasons why these tapes are not convincing and probably shouldn't be taken at face value.

1) The tapes are heavily edited, and there's no way to know what was cut out. So there's a lot of context missing.

2) We don't know anything about the Acorn employees. We know for sure that the pimp is not a real pimp, and the prostitute is not a real prostitute. They are filmmaker James O'Keefe and his partner Hannah Giles, ambush documentary filmmakers intent on finding (or in this case creating) dirt on Acorn. We know that the people advising them are real Acorn employees, but how do we know they weren't also "undercover" operatives who got the jobs in order to discredit Acorn?

3) We don't know what they thought. Let's not forget that the films do not show a real pimp and prostitute receiving advice. They show a documentary filmmaker pretending to be one, somewhat clumsily. It's entirely possible that the employees thought it was a joke, saw the camera, or otherwise just weren't fooled and were giving semi-shady advice to someone who obviously wasn't doing anything illegal.

Finally, even if you're outraged by the advice they gave, and even if you're sure that they were real legitimate Acorn employees with no hidden agenda and they were completely taken in by O'Keefe's clever ruse, I have to ask so what? The employees involved were all fired, and according to this Washington Post article Acorn claims that employees at 5 other Acorn offices denied them assistance and/or called police. So clearly these employees were acting contrary to Acorn's training and official policies. Do you call for the whole police force to be disbanded whenever a cop is filmed beating the shit out of some innocent kid?

The problem is that the group is federally funded to provide *legal* advice to low-income communities.

ACORN is supposed to be helping people get federal grants for housing if they qualify for it and provide other service that they may not be able to afford. As soon as the pimp/prostitute opened their mouth asking for help obtaining a federal grant to open an illegal brothel they should have been told no.

There were 3 offices that they filmed giving illegal advice. That's not disputed, nor do I believe that the tapes have been doctored (if that was their defense they would not have been fired so quickly). Stating that they were turned down at 5 other offices doesn't hold a lot of weight, that's still 37.5% of their offices that failed the test.

If almost 40% of police officers were out beating people I would say the whole department has issues. If 40% of cops are beating people, the other 60% have to know what is going on. Even if they are not actively doing it themselves they are not stopping it from happening, which still makes them accomplices under the law. So yes, I would still hold the entire group responsible.

Still though you haven't addressed the fact that the people asking for advice were not who they claimed to be and there's no reason to believe the Acorn employees thought they were.

The women working for Acorn deal with actual members of their community every day. It is almost certain that some of their clients are or have been pimps and prostitutes. Some of the workers themselves are former prostitutes.

James O'Keefe is an educated white guy who talks like me. Would you believe he was an authentic pimp? Do you really think those women were fooled?

It doesn't matter what they believed, the advice they gave was illegal. Whether they meant it or were joking doesn't matter; they gave the advice and never once did they state that it should not be acted upon.

People need to be held accountable for their actions. If they didn't mean it then they shouldn't have said it.

I agree in principle but I don't think that you can equate what is basically poor handling of being the butt of a joke with actually deliberately giving illegal advice.

You're essentially chastising Acorn for not having spent sufficient time and funds on training their people to deal with hostile documentary film crews, which really should not be a core part of their mission anyway.

I'm really having trouble understanding what the source of all the animosity toward Acorn is. Even before this, going back to early in the 2008 election there was a lot of grumbling.

I'm sure there are plenty of other federally and state funded agencies who employ workers who are not trained to handle ambush film makers asking leading questions, and could be tricked into saying something incriminating. In fact I would wager that this is true of almost any large organization anywhere. So why all the fuss about Acorn?

I agree, the aggressiveness of this may be politically driven but it does not change the results: they still broke the law. Regardless of the motivation I still think that warrants punishment.

The animosity towards ACORN started after the 2008 election when they were accused of voter registration fraud for submitting illegal voter registration paperwork. I won't quote figures here because I don't have time to look them up, but it wasn't just a few here and there. There have been numerous allegations of voter fraud and ACORN employees or contractors have pleaded guilty on a number of occasions, which makes me think they aren't all contrived.

In addition to the original 3 videos 2 more have surfaced, this time of offices in National City and San Bernardino. While I hear only clips of the videos have been played on TV, it will be interesting to see the un-edited versions to find out what actually happened. My guess is that it will be shockingly similar to the other videos.

Well, keep in mind that there's no way of knowing how many ACORN employees in total they tried to get on camera. They could have tried 100 times with other offices and not even been given the time of day - the fact that they were able to find three or so people stupid enough to get fooled isn't really indicative of anything. Besides, it's not like these people caught on film are high-up ACORN organizers or anything. They're just some low-level idiots, the same as the individuals involved in the voter fraud scandal. One could argue that ACORN needs to tighten up its employment practices, of course that would be ignoring the fact that it's a NON PROFIT, LARGELY VOLUNTEER GROUP.

Sure their organization may be largely incompetent, but we're talking about a loosely collected network of barely connected and mostly untrained individuals. Incompetency in a non-profit group should, under no circumstances, be a criminal offense. The fact that people are trying to make ACORN into the next ENRON is just ridiculous.

Incompetency in a non-profit group should, under no circumstances, be a criminal offense.

If incompetency includes giving improper tax advise to disobey federal laws then it is a criminal offense.

You have to be licensed to be a tax professional for this exact reason, so that you don't go around telling people to cheat the government. If ACORN is allowing people who are not licensed to give tax advice then they are in the wrong, and if these people are certified tax specialists then that is even worse because they *should* know better.

I won't even touch the brother, underage prostitution, illegal immigrant, or illegal campaign funding topics. But I will say that I think a group that was created to serve the community should be more community minded and not want to support this. Guess that is asking too much.

And by the way, you don't 'fire' volunteers (like they have already started to do), you fire paid employees. And if they are so incompetent then they do not deserve federal funding to continue such stupidity.

I agree with most of what you said here, but I do want to point out that prostitution is not illegal at the federal level, so the specific tax advice about that was actually not too bad.

I agree with Mike that the reason ACORN is being targeted is politically motivated. Expanding further on that thought here is an article which discusses a study done by two academics who studied the (false) allegations of voter fraud made against ACORN in the run-up to the election by Republicans and picked up by the media. http://uepi.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/manipulating-the-public-agenda-why-acorn-was-in-the-news-and-what-the-news-got-wrong/

The reason they’re a good target for Republicans is that they register a large number of low income individuals to vote (who by a very wide margin tend to vote Democrat) and they’re a community organization which is largely run in the inner cities, which allows the right to make fictitious connections between ACORN and President Obama (remember he used to be a community organizer in inner city Chicago). In short destroy / discredit ACORN and you can A. Destroy an effective form of registering Democrats, and B. Discredit the Obama administration (or at least attempt to).

Since this was posted, congress has voted to defund ACORN, which interestingly enough actually may be unconstitutional because it’s probably a Bill of Attainder (punishing a group, or individual without a court ruling them guilty of anything).

Whether everything that is on this website is true or not, here's a listing of 'ACORN fraud':
http://www.rottenacorn.com/activityMap.html

Some entries from there:
NV 2009 Nevada authorities indicted ACORN on 26 counts of voter registration fraud and 13 counts of illegally compensating canvassers. ACORN provided a bonus compensation program called “Blackjack” or “21+” for any canvasser who registered more than 20 voters per shift, which is illegal under Nevada law.

IN 2008 Election officials in Indiana have thrown out more than 4,000 ACORN-submitted voter registrations after finding they had identical handwriting and included the names of many deceased Indianans, and even the name of a fast food restaurant.

PA 2008 State election officials have thrown out 57,435 voter registrations, the majority of which were submitted by ACORN. The registrations were thrown out after officials found "clearly fraudulent" signatures, vacant lots listed as addresses, and other signs of fraud.

TX 2008 In Harris County, nearly 10,000 ACORN-submitted registrations were found to be invalid, including many with clearly fraudulent addresses or other personal information.

WA 2007 Three ACORN employees pleaded guilty, and four more were charged, in the worst case of voter registration fraud in Washington state history. More than 2,000 fraudulent voter registration cards were submitted by the group during a voter registration drive.

As I said before, people don't plead guilty or get convicted (hopefully) for acts that are fabricated. Some of this may be political white-wash by Republicans but you have to admit that not all of it is.

Whether or not that reflects poorly on ACORN or on our political process as a whole I don't know. I'm a realist, I know that there are and will continue to be people out there defrauding the government. BUT I don't think they should be supplemented with government funds to do so.

Follow-up: California's attorney general watched the unedited tapes, and apparently it was all bullshit.

I don't think it has as much to do with editing as it does legal technicalities.

I was watching some lawyers analyze the issue on some TV show and the defense attorney basically said that they would have actually had to use the advice that they got. If they had done what the Acorn people had suggested, then they all would have been guilty of a criminal offense.

But since they never actually planned to use what the people told them then it didn't matter. That seems like BS to me.

I don't really care that other people in other offices caught on to the ploy and they didn't put that into the video. That isn't material to the people who didn't know. However, it would be interesting to watch the un-edited videos of the people who didn't realize that it was a scam (Baltimore and DC).