By which our lives are all improved by angry racists

by: Eric B.

Fri Sep 25, 2009 at 12:11:52 PM EDT

Monique Redmond, a 38-year-old Lansing resident who came to ACORN for help when a utility company threatened to turn off her heat in mid-winter, questions who will help now.

"The little people won't have a voice at all now," she said. "Where am I going to go if this happens again?"

You can find that quote tucked away towards the back of an article that started with this:

An angry voice mail laced with a racial epithet was the final straw for Carrie Guzman.

An anonymous caller to the local Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, office, left the message. No complaint was filed with police, but the office will close next week.

I give you the American Right, which today stands for basically nothing more than a loud angry campaign to collect the scalps of its "enemies."  Congratulations, shitheads.

(For a P.S. to this post, follow me below the fold...)

While we're on this topic, I suppose it's time to address the ACORN "scandal" in general.  I see that the IRS is suspending its ties to the group, which means more poor people will go without tax assistance next week.  This is in response to the loud yelling by the Right that the group is crooked and corrupt chiefly on the grounds that it empowers poor dark-skinned people that finally culminated in the video "exposing" ACORN as being a front for pimps and hookers.

To that specific charge, having seen the video, I can attest to a couple of things here.

*--Prostitution takes place, and will continue to take place regardless of legal status.

*--Because it is illegal, it goes untaxed.

*--When a hooker sets up a business through which she reports income so she can qualify for low-income assistance, she winds up paying taxes on her income as a hooker, that previously would not have been paid.

*--The Right, in exposing this, has now cost the federal government tax dollars it would have otherwise not collected on activity because it is otherwise illegal.

So, to sum up ... the Right has not only made it more difficult for poor people to get assistance with utility bills and staving off foreclosures by demonizing a community organizing group, but it will also cost the federal government the opportunity to collect tax dollars on illegal activity that will take place anyway with or without the government's blessing. And, the Right did this with no purpose in mind more noble that satisfying its own bloodlust.