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After several employees of the Tacoma ACORN office were indicted in Seattle, with the help of Tacoma prosecutors, we’re now learning more about corrupt practices within their organization.

Despite raking in a troubling 40 percent of its revenue from taxpayers over the last three years, ACORN Housing Corporation’s actions range from controversial to borderline illegal:

• AHC has worked to obtain mortgages for illegal aliens
• AHC relies on undocumented income, “under the table” money that may not be reported to the Internal Revenue Service
• ACORN’s “financial justice” operations attack lenders for “exotic” loans, but AHC has recommended ten-year interest-only loans (which deny equity to the buyer) and reverse mortgages (which can be detrimental to senior citizens)
• AHC may have violated federal law by failing to maintain a proper distinction between its tax-exempt housing work and the aggressive political activities of ACORN

Not much of an advocacy / counseling group if they steer people wrong when they come in for help. Makes me wonder who’s interests they are really advocating. Actually, no it doesn’t. There’s ample evidence that they’re nothing more than a left-wing political group pretending to be something else.

When charges where filed in Seattle the organization was supposedly cooperating with authorities to prosecute their supposedly wayward employees. Considering there were several other cities where charges were filed against their employees, some of us doubted that these people were acting outside of their organization’s policies. Now we see even more evidence of corruption.

I’m not sure if this is a sign of improvement, but Puget Sound is ranked only 9th worst in the nation for drive time congestion in a recent report by Inrix of Kirkland. Some other lowlights from the report puts us 10th worst in overall congestion, 6th worst in their ‘Drive Time Travel Time Index’ and we have the 8th worst travel time hour.

Funny thing about these rankings, they don’t often show any improvement when a city’s rank changes. Instead they show that the other cities got worse. However, in this case we can claim that we have the 7th largest decrease in drive time congestion from 2006 to 2007. Things improved by a whopping 0.2%. Sounds like a new plank in the Democrat governor’s campaign. Finally she has something to hang her hat on besides quid-pro-quo legislation for her campaign donors.

In other news Silicon Valley can produce more then chips and disks. Scientists there have come up witha genetically altered microbe that eats agricultural waste and excretes crude oil. They wouldn’t put it in their own cars, but they think it will get us off of our Saudi oil dependency (no mention of Venezuela). Maybe someday I’ll be able to put my grass clippings into my SUV.
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Liberals are attacking the platform adopted by the WA GOP Convention in Spokane over the weekend. Some of their attack is based on misrepresentations and some is based on values that differ greatly from the people who actually adopted the platform, the WA GOP grassroots voters.

The WA GOP Convention

I’ve been trying to get a better feel for all that went on over the weekend. I wasn’t there since I didn’t even submit my name for consideration as a delegate in the Pierce County convention. I figured I wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything there so it would be a waste of my time and money. From all reports, as I expected, it was politics as usual, something that usually turns the grassroots off and drives them away from the party (like it’s doing to me).
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It was frustration with the Washington State Republican Party (WSRP) that first prompted me to refer to myself as a ‘Republican by default’ several years ago. It stemmed from all the trips to the voting booth where I couldn’t find a candidate that I could vote for so I ended up voting against the other candidate. I still voted Republican, but only because the other guy was worse.

That same feeling returned when I showed up at the caucuses in February of this year. Fred Thompson had already withdrawn and Mitt Romney withdrew shortly before we the event. The base of the party wasn’t having a party. We were stuck with a candidate who had kicked us to the curb several times in the last six years as he journeyed leftward, probably the result of his previous defeat in the battle for the party’s presidential nomination.
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I’ve been reading some of the posts over at TheNextRight.com. It covers the spectrum of Republican opinion with a majority of the posts being relatively conservative.

There’s a pretty good article about the Ron Paul campaign. It puts it into context fairly well. I’m not a Paul fan so I’m guessing that some of his die-hard supporters would differ with the opinion presented in that post.

The left-leaning side of the site is a mixed-bag on some of the ‘moderate’ (which I consider to be ‘liberal Republican’) posts. One such post, which I won’t link to, was a typical McCain supporter bashing principled conservatives with the usual tripe. I don’t bother pointing out the error when someone posts garbage like that because I’ve found that it isn’t worth the effort.

What McCain supporters are trying to do is to paint conservatives who continue to oppose him as though they are just being petty and emotional about the issue. I do understand some of where they’re coming from, and it doesn’t paint a very good picture of them.
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