Flashback: PA Senator Bob Casey Voted to Continue Funding ACORN

Flashback: PA Senator Bob Casey Voted to Continue Funding ACORN

A video showing Pennsylvania’s hard-left Sen. Bob Casey (D) praising ACORN, America’s foremost proponent of voter fraud and mortgage mischief, disappeared recently just in time for next week’s critical election.

Casey appears in the 2008 video praising the gangster group known by the acronym ACORN, a radical socialist organization that used to employ President Obama. In the video dated May 12, 2008, called “ACORN Grassroots Democracy Campaign,” he hails the now-bankrupt Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

During a segment in the video about residential mortgage foreclosures, Casey says:

So for ACORN to step into that breach and say, we in the case of ACORN will step in and try to help families, to be their advocate, to be their voice, is critically important. Because as important as it is here in Washington to pass legislation in the House and the Senate -that’s obviously important- but we cannot do this alone.

I had accessed the video on July 22, 2010 while I was working on the manuscript for my exposé of ACORN, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Ripping Off and Terrorizing American Taxpayers, but now the 9-minute clip is locked. The video may only be viewed with the permission of the YouTube account holder. Visit the web address for the video and this message appears: “This video is private. Sorry about that.” (I previously reported on the disappearance of the video.

As Casey is well aware, ACORN, and ACORN’s 20-odd, still-active successor groups, routinely use violence to forcibly occupy homes.

The group helped to contribute to the now-collapsed mortgage bubble by promoting the Community Reinvestment Act and by blackmailing banks into making loans to people who shouldn’t have been purchasing homes. Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s terminal chief organizer, was herself a squatter who decided there was good money in rabble-rousing.

Casey has been a longtime champion of ACORN, once America’s largest Saul Alinsky-inspired leftist direct-action group.

When undercover videos shot by James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles surfaced at Breitbart.com in 2009, Casey stood by ACORN, as video after video showed ACORN’s willingness to facilitate child prostitution, sex trafficking, mortgage fraud, tax evasion, and other crimes.

When legislation came before the Senate to ban all federal funding of the ACORN empire of activism consisting of 370-plus affiliated organizations, Casey voted in favor of keeping taxpayer funds flowing to ACORN. Last year I revealed in Subversion Inc. that at least $79 million in taxpayer-funded federal grants had been funneled to ACORN and affiliates since 1994.

Casey was one of only seven U.S. senators who voted against the interests of American taxpayers. The other senators backing ACORN were Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), self-described socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Roland Burris (D-IL) who took over Obama’s seat after he became president. (The recorded vote number 275 on S.Amdt. 2355 to H.R. 3288 took place on Sept. 14, 2009.)

Casey, a freshman, was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 when he humiliated then-incumbent Rick Santorum (R). Casey thumped Santorum, beating him by an astounding 17.3 percentage points.

But today Casey is fighting for his political life.

His Republican challenger is Tom Smith, a Tea Party conservative backed by Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund. Smith is behind Casey by only one percentage point (Casey 46%, Smith 45%) according to Rasmussen. Casey is also well below the critical 50% mark under which incumbents usually have difficulty getting reelected.

Other politicians, including Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-MD), and Congressman Brad Miller (D-NC), also praise ACORN in the video. Political strategist and CNN commentator Paul Begala appears in the video, speaking at length. Congressmen Barney Frank (D-MA) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) make silent cameo appearances in the video.

Although ACORN Inc., the shell corporation that controlled the entire ACORN network, filed for bankruptcy on Election Day 2010, ACORN lives on in the form of more than two dozen separate organizations that share the same radical, anti-American objectives.

Its fraud-prone get-out-the-vote unit, Project Vote, remains in business. President Obama worked for Project Vote in Chicago in 1992, and he subsequently lectured and trained ACORN operatives.

At least 54 individuals employed by or associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud, sometimes called electoral fraud or election fraud, is a blanket term used by lawyers that encompasses a host of election-related improprieties including fraudulent voting, double-voting, voter registration fraud, perjury, forgery, counterfeiting, impersonation, intimidation, and identity fraud.

ACORN itself was convicted of a species of voter fraud last year in Nevada. ACORN/Project Vote senior official Amy Adele Busefink, was convicted in the massive conspiracy.

Despite this, Busefink remains employed at Project Vote, which is involved in a get-out-the-vote drive for the approaching election. Busefink had appealed her conviction, arguing that the Nevada law forbidding cash bonuses for voter registration was unconstitutional.

On October 4 of this year, the Supreme Court of Nevada rejected her appeal, upholding both her conviction and the electoral integrity law she challenged.

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