ACORN sues filmakersFollow

Turtle,



Yes you do.



And I care about not allowing corporations that financed the president to get away with promoting child postitution. Then again you didn't give a sh*t when Rev. Wright was spouting his anti-america rhetoric nor did you give a sh*t about Ayers' illegal dealings and Obama's direct connection with him. You only seem to care about something when it affects Democrats. I guess it's easier on your conscious that way.



It's better than the Democrats who appear to be supporting child prostitution.

Locked,



Yeah what were we thinking using Barrack Hussein Obama's full name during the campaign.



Probably because Democrats are selfish tw*ts who would rather steal from their neighbor than do for themselves.

No, it's not. You need to learn what "entrapment" is. First off, the term normally only applies to police officers and whether or not a crime can be prosecuted. But even if we ignore that distinction, it requires that the entrapper perform some sort of inducement or coercion to get someone to commit a crime which they would not otherwise have been willing to commit. Going to some guy and talking him into selling drugs for you by waving money around and convincing him how much he could make is entrapment. Walking up to the same guy and asking if he'll sell you drugs is not.

All they did was provide an opportunity for the employees to break the law. They did not force them. They did not coerce them. They did not provide an inducement to do so. The case in question is *exactly* analogous to a cop trying to buy drugs from a suspected dealer and is absolutely *not* entrapment.



Intent is irrelevant. They wanted to learn how far ACORN employees would be willing to go to fraudulently hand out taxpayer money. They cooked up a method to test this. They succeeded far beyond their wildest expectations.

You also need to look up the term "vigilante". A vigilante enforces the law on their own. Had these kids then arrested and detained and perhaps attempted to punish the ACORN employees on their own, you could call them vigilantes. Simply determining if someone is breaking the law and then presenting your information to the public is *not* vigilantism. It's called being a good citizen.

If someone calls the cops when they witness a crime, are they a vigilante now? That's silly.



Keep dreaming. I anticipate that this thing will fly about as well as a lead balloon.



For someone who doesn't care, you sure seem upset. If this was a big corporation and someone released tapes showing their employees committing fraud, would you be so cavalier? Perhaps it is your own bias that's at play here?

I'm also amused at your mangling of the concept of "privacy rights". Who's privacy was violated here? The employee was working in a publicly accessible area and engaged with the people who filmed him/her. If a third party stole records related to their clients, you'd have a point. But they *were* the clients. They have every freaking right to expose the details of their own interaction with the ACORN employees.

I'm also curious what sort of due process you think is involved. They are not law enforcement. They are not arresting anyone. They are not charging anyone with a crime. While others might, they didn't do so. All they did was record a conversation they had with a publicly funded employee. You're on the totally wrong side of this issue.




I would think that exposing fraud within an organization that handles our tax dollars would be of interest to all Americans, not just those who vote Republican. It's telling that you seem to want to circle the wagons here. For someone who doesn't care about ACORN at all, you seem to want to go to great lengths to demonize anyone who questions them. Why?

Edited, Sep 24th 2009 3:58pm by gbaji

You also anticipate that the SCotUS will be hearing cases on Obama's birth certificate before the year's end. I'm not sure you're my go-to source for all things judicial.

I absolutely believe that H&R Block employees are trained not to commit fraud on behalf of their customers. In fact, I'd expect that they probably have quite rigorous rules about this and work very hard to make sure that no one breaks them. Can you guess why?




Sure. But apparently not every ACORN worker did. That's the problem. See. If a single H&R Block employee was caught helping someone fraudulently file their taxes, the company would be fined massive amounts of money and might lose its license as a tax preparer. If 5 were caught doing this?


You know. If we're going to make the comparison...



Missing the point. The training is "Don't commit fraud". You're getting caught up on the details. They're extreme of course, but that's not really the issue. The issue isn't that when a pimp and prostitute showed up in the ACORN office, they weren't shown the door. My Stepmom worked as a social worker in the welfare office in Santa Cruz back in the late 70s. I'm well aware of the "colorful" nature of the people who might show up in a place like that on any given day. That's absolutely not it, and it's cute that you assume that it is.

The problem is that these employees knowingly advised these people on how to commit fraud. Do you get that? It's not about what they were dressed as. It's not about prostitution. It's about someone walking into an ACORN office, saying "I earn $120,000 dollars a year, but is there any way I can get government assisted housing?", and is told by the employee to lie about her income, to claim dependents she does not have, and to falsify a whole slew of government documents.

That the person in question was pretending to be a prostitute looking to set up a child prostitution ring is really just the icing on the cake. It's designed to grab attention, of course, but also to provide an extreme situation in which there should be absolutely zero moral ambiguity. No one should be able to claim that they helped someone lie "just a little bit" because they were in such a sad and difficult state. It's kinda hard to play the sympathy/hardship card when the situation involves a prostitute making 10k/month and her desire to set up a child prostitution ring.




Key point is that you never answered the question. One might think you're avoiding the whole "Do you think their current system for preventing fraud is working?" question. Why is that?


Either the training they received is sufficient to assure that two kids with a video camera can't catch 5 different employees at 5 different locations commit fraud, or it isn't. Is this really a subject of debate? Of course their training wasn't sufficient. If you looking for why ACORN the organization is responsible, that's it.

Edited, Sep 24th 2009 5:40pm by gbaji

Yes. It was hysterical that you still fail to grasp that other organizations are held accountable for the actions of their employees. The degree of accountability does kinda hinge on the degree of violation though, doesn't it? If 5 H&R Block employees at 5 different offices in 5 different cities all failed to pass a similar type of sting, you can bet the entire organization would be on notice.

In a day and age when we condemn and fine a company for paying their employees bonuses that some thinks are too large, it's hard to figure out where your sudden willingness to look the other way when it comes to fraud at an organization comes from.



NO. NO. NO. NO. NO!


I said this the last time someone invented that strawman position for me. I have *never* said this. Stop inventing stuff to argue against.


My position has always been that the the environment at ACORN lends itself to its employees committing fraud. That is an entirely different thing. They don't have to train anyone to commit fraud. Just not train them well enough not to, and put pressure on them to hand out as much money to as many clients as possible.

An organization like ACORN has a responsibility to ensure that the trust placed in it is not misplaced. They are supposed to be making sure this sort of thing doesn't happen. They have failed to do this.




What I am saying now is completely consistent with what I have said all along. If you'd read what I write instead of other people's strawman interpretations, you might understand this. What's so frustrating is that this is now the second time someone has accused me of changing my story by making the exact same false claim about what I "started out saying".

I have not ever said that ACORN trained their employees to commit fraud.




Sure. But they are responsible for making sure their employees *dont* do those things. There should be a greater degree of responsibility placed on organizations handling public funds than private companies, but it seems like many seem to view this the other way around. If a private company mismanages their money, it's their money. It's their loss. Of course, they're less likely to tolerate such incompetence or illegality from their employees exactly because it is their money at stake. But that's why organizations handling public money need to hold themselves to an even higher standard and really should come under even greater oversight. They are handling other people's money. Not theirs. They don't lose anything if their employees hand out that money incorrectly, or commit fraud along the way. Thus, unless the folks running it are very very committed to doing the right thing, it's quit easy for things to slide and the sort of events we see on those videos happen.

It's not the exception, it's the rule. When no one has a vested interest in avoiding fraud, and no one is looking out for it, it's going to happen. You can dismiss this as just a few bad apples, but the environment itself lends itself to people doing that sort of thing. They don't lose anything. They make other people happy. The people get their free money. And the organization can show much much money they handed out to people "in need" and clap itself on the back, get awards, get invited to political events, etc. Everyone wins if the employees commit fraud... Except the taxpayers who are footing the bill.


I just don't know how many times I have to explain this process before you get it. It does not require deliberate action by the organization as a whole to cause this. It need only not act deliberately to prevent fraud to ensure that it happens. Whether anyone chose not to act to prevent it is subject to debate of course, but it's clear that ACORN as an organization has failed to act in a manner we should expect of one trusted with handling public money.




Sure. And if the companies profits weren't based on whether or not they got paid for drinks you handed out, might you have made a different choice?

Do you see how what ACORN does changes that dynamic?



My "partisan rage" is due largely to people like you who refuse to admit that an organization so closely tied to their own partisan agenda should be held accountable for their activities. It's because so many people are willing to look the other way if illegal activities benefit them, or a political cause they agree with. It's because of the incredible double standard being employed, where we see liberal political organizations and entities engaged in questionable actions time and time again being ignored, or defended, or made to be victims, while the slightest hint of something amiss on the other side of the political fence becomes front page news.


When you've got a prominent news anchor saying "what story" a week after the initial videos surfaced, it speaks volumes about the degree of "headinsandism" going on out there. It reminds some of us of the Reverand Wright videos, which floated around the internet for 6 months before a single mainstream media outlet would touch the story. And that was almost an additional 3 months after they appeared on youtube and got millions of hits.


It's just startling the degree to which some people just want to ignore problems when they don't fit their own politics. If Acorn were a fortune500 company, and this was a case of embezzlement, you'd be all over it. And that's the bigger issue btw. It's not about prostitution. It's really about stealing of taxpayer money. ACORN is entrusted to handle that money. It should be responsible for making sure it's doing a good job, and if it can't, it should no longer be allowed to do so. Companies lose their licenses to do all sorts of things for usually far less than this. Yet because it's a non-profit and handles taxpayer money, we should just chastise the individuals involved and do nothing else?


Sorry. That's just not sufficient.

This was being mentioned even before the House passed their bill blocking Acorn but the Congressional Research Service believes that the legislation blocking funds from Acorn is possibly (probably, according to some) unconstitutional.