re: #27 Dark_Falcon

Agreed. The lawsuit is a mistake for them. To use iceweasel’s turn of phrase: they got PWNed by O’Keefe, and their butthurt is leading them to seek revenge in an ill-considered lawsuit.

There’s a lot more problems than that about any attempts to prosecute ACORN. Check this out:

Riding the crest of the media frenzy surrounding the ACORN revelations, Republican legislators pushed for the more punitive outcome: mustering broad support for passage of a law aimed at cutting ACORN’s funding - a paltry $53 million over the past 15 years - based on the misconduct of a small group of employees.

The problem is, in enacting a law that makes it possible to hold a group like ACORN responsible for the actions of its employees, the GOP might have opened up Pandora’s box. Consider, for example, some other groups that receive government funds (far in excess of $53 million over 15 years) whose employees have committed far more grievous crimes (ie, rape and murder for employees of KBR, Blackwater and other private contractors). Ryan Grim on some of the implications:

Going after ACORN may be like shooting fish in a barrel lately — but jumpy lawmakers used a bazooka to do it last week and may have blown up some of their longtime allies in the process.

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who’s Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.

obsidianwings.blogs.com

Expect to see this quietly fade away. Heh.