Congressional Report Exposes Fraud And Corrpution With ACORN

Most of us have known that the voter-fraud organization known as ACORN is among the most corrupt entities being given access to Capitol Hill by the Democrats. Now, a new report coming out of Congress shows that the corruption runs deeper than we first thought.

From Fox News:

[T]he report offers the first detailed account of the allegations that have dogged the organization in recent months. The executive summary of the report says ACORN provided contributions of financial and personnel resources to indicted former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and candidate Obama, among others, in what the report calls a scheme to use taxpayer money to support a partisan political agenda, which would be a clear violation of numerous tax and election laws. “Both structurally and operationally, ACORN hides behind a paper wall of nonprofit corporate protections to conceal a criminal conspiracy on the part of its directors, to launder federal money in order to pursue a partisan agenda and to manipulate the American electorate,” an executive summary of the report reads.

Of course, ACORN is denying all charges. But they cannot deny the facts in the case:

The report accuses ACORN, after receiving more than $53 million in federal funds since 1994, of blurring the legal distinctions among 361 tax-exempt and non-exempt entities to divert that money into partisan political activities. Evidence found in the report relies in part on documents provided by former ACORN employees. “Operationally, ACORN is a shell game played in 120 cities, 43 states and the District of Columbia through a complex structure designed to conceal illegal activities, to use taxpayer and tax-exempt dollars for partisan political purposes, and to distract investigators,” the report read. “Structurally, ACORN is a chess game in which senior management is shielded from accountability by multiple layers of volunteers and compensated employees who serve as pawns to take the fall for every bad act.”

These are very serious findings that we Americans should take note of and demand accountability from our elected representatives.

Here’s why:

It would be up to the chairman of the oversight panel to hold hearings on the ACORN report and up to the Justice Department to pursue a criminal investigation. Likewise, the census director will determine whether ACORN remains a partner with the U.S. Census Bureau to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States.

Do we want an organization that actively engages in voter fraud and other corrupt activities to be involved in something so important as a Constitutionally mandated census?

No. We do not. ACORN should be dissolved and their leaders arrested and frog-marched to prison.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

GOP Congressional Report Accuses ACORN Of Political Corruption, Widespread Fraud
FoxNews.com
July 22, 2009

Star Parker: Government Health Care Plantation Looms

I love reading Star Parker’s columns. She seems to have a way of looking at things, not necessarily from an opposite direction, but just enough of a different direction that things tend to become clearer. Her latest column concerning socialized medicine does just that.

From Town Hall:

Rather than moving dysfunctional America off the welfare state, as we did with welfare reform in 1996, we are now moving the free, functioning, and once prosperous part of our nation onto the welfare state. Bills out of committees in both the House and the Senate contain all the elements of President Obama’s dream to get as many Americans onto the government health care plantation as possible.

That’s right. Instead of getting people off of a dependence on the government, socialized health care is an attempt to get people dependent on the government.

More:

We’ve got creation of the new government run insurance plan that supposedly will create new competition. We’ve got fines on employers who don’t provide insurance and fines on individuals who don’t buy it. And we’ve got the trillions of dollars in new spending to subsidize insurance purchases for low to middle income Americans and expand Medicaid to get more low income Americans into it. And, of course, we’ve got the massive new government bureaucracy to oversee it all.

You read that right. More fines and more taxes. Health care reform was supposed to make things less expensive but the fines and taxes are going to make it more expensive for us. And why is Obama so hell bent on fining someone who chooses not to buy health insurance?

Here’s some more insight you won’t read about in Old Media:

Obama continues to tell the many millions of Americans currently insured through their employer not to worry, that “If you like your health care plan you can keep that…” But we know this is a slight of hand. Many employers will gladly pay the fine and purge their employees into the government plan. And how will private plans possibly compete with the government plan when politicians can reach into taxpayer pockets anytime they want to keep on subsidizing it? The Lewin Group estimates that a hundred twenty million Americans may be driven into the government plan.

120 million Americans. (140 if you count the 20 million illegals who will be eligible for taxpayer-funded health care.) And how are we going to pay for health care for all of them? New taxes. If you are one of the top 5% earners who happens to live in the state of Maryland, then you will be paying over 50 cents on every dollar you work to earn if the new taxes to pay for other people’s health care goes through.

And about that promise to keep private insurance companies “honest?” Let’s look at the government’s track record on that:

Harvard’s Malcom Sparrow, a specialist in health-care fraud, estimates annual Medicare fraud at $85 billion. The Government Accountability Office estimates Medicaid fraud at around $33 billion annually. So that’s $120 billion a year in government health care fraud! This is who will keep private companies “honest?”

This socialized health care plan is a disaster waiting to happen, just as it happened in every other country it has been tried in.

We need to stop it before it wrecks the entire health system.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Government Health Care Plantation Looms
Star Parker
TownHall.com
July 20, 2009

Star Parker is the author of Uncle Sam’s Plantation:

Uncle Sam’s Plantation on amazon.com

Obama’s Lies About Deficits

Okay, how many of you were doubled over with laughter after President Obama made the following remark yesterday:

“We’re not going to be able to fall back into the same old habits,” Mr. Obama said. “The casual dishonesty of hiding irresponsible spending with clever accounting tricks, the costly overruns, the fraud and abuse, the endless excuses.”

This, coming from a President who forced a piece of legislation, crafted behind closed doors and without the input of the opposition party, through Congress and even broke his own promise of openess, transparency and a five-day window for the public to review legislation before he signs it into law.

And how about that “fraud and abuse” part. Did he not see the earmarks going to ACORN, the notorius voter fraud organization? Did he not notice other pork and wasteful spending in his porkulus package? And now, he expects us to believe that he is fiscally responsible? His next spending plan has over 9,000 earmarks in it!

How dumb does Barack Obama think were are? Only the most brain-washed partisan Democrats would believe Obama’s remarks.

Here’s some more idoicy from a man who graduated from an Ivy League school:

“If we confront this crisis without also confronting the deficits that helped cause it, we risk sinking into another crisis down the road,” the president warned, promising to cut the yearly deficit in half by the end of his four-year term. “We cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences.”

And yet, he had no problem signing into law a package that will have to be paid off by our children and grandchildren. Again, how stupid does he think we are?

More:

“We are paying the price for these deficits right now,” Obama said, estimating the country spends $250 billion — one in every ten dollars of taxpayer money — in interest on the national debt. “I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay.”

But that is precisely what the President is doing. He is simply trying to lay the blame at someone else’s feet. I don’t buy it. After that porkulus/spendulus bill passed, the Dems now own this economy. They have no one to blame but themsleves and they know it. That is why Obama and the Dems are scrambling to pass the buck so that their popularity doesn’t take too much of a hit.

They say that actions speak louder than words. Right now, Obama’s words are being drowned out by his actions and the actions of his socialist allies in Congress. He is lying to us and the Dems are hoping that you and I will buy it hook, line and sinker.

I’m not that blind. I see what is really happening and no amount of spin or lies from the Oval Office and the Democrat controlled Congress will ever change the truth.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Obama Pledges Decrease In Deficit — After Increase (More Than Doubling It)
Associated Press via NewsMax.com
February 23, 2009

Medicare Rife With Fraud: The Dems Model For Socialized Medicine

Socialized Medicine is a disaster. It is a disaster up in Canada where medical travel agencies help patients travel to the U.S. to get proper and sometimes life-saving care; it is a disaster over in Great Britain where patients wait up to 13 hours in ambulance lines before they get taken into an Emergeny Room to wait and additional 9 hours to receive care.

But we don’t need to go any further than the latest Medicare audit to see exactly how how much of a disaster it would be here in then Unted States. Even the New York Times gets it. From Charles Duhigg:

Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system. … In calculating the agency’s rate of improper payments, Medicare officials told outside auditors to ignore government policies that would have accurately measured fraud, according to the report. For example, auditors were told not to compare invoices from salespeople against doctors’ records, as required by law, to make sure that medical equipment went to actual patients.

The Medicare audit claimed a fraud rate of only 7.5%.

But the inspector general’s review indicated that the actual error rate was closer to 31.5 percent.

And how did this 31.5% rate come about? Like this:

Equipment sellers have submitted counterfeit documents, forged doctors’ signatures and filed claims on behalf of patients who were dead or had never been seen by the prescribing physician, according to many reports by government oversight agencies. For example, a Florida businessman was sentenced last year to 37 months in prison for submitting more than $5.5 million of fake claims to Medicare. The businessman operated for months, despite giving the agency an address that was actually a utility closet. On July 1, Medicare instituted a new competitive bidding system that officials said would reduce both fraud and costs for medical equipment. On July 15, however, Congress suspended the program, after equipment manufacturers and sellers began an aggressive lobbying campaign.

Lobbyists. That explains a great deal about why this fraud is occurring.

But the main thing to remember is that this fraud-laden program is what the Dems would have us all subscribe to under Socialized Medicine.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Report Rejects Medicare Boast Of Paring Fraud
Charles Duhigg
The New York Times
August 20, 2008