Today’s ACORN Harvest

ACORN sure is a tough nut of a story. And it’s not going away. Not with days like today.

With their pimp, ho, and underage slave enabling business in shambles, their Get Out The Fictional Character Vote process under the microscope, and their Game the Census for Dems and Dollars program severed, they must have really been upset to learn that one of their most beautiful scams — Get the IRS to pay you to show people how to screw the IRS — is also being shut out.

The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday it would no longer include ACORN in its volunteer tax assistance program. The program offered free tax advice to about 3 million low- and moderate-income tax filers this spring.

I wonder if there are going to be some eyes on the 25,000 returns they helped file?

Of course most of the attention has been brought about because of the tapes made by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, released with the help of Andrew Breitbart on his new site – BigGovernment.com and aired, almost exclusively until TOM had no other choice but to pay attention to the story, on FOX News. Well if they wanted this story to go away there was probably a lot better way than suing the messenger.

Bertha Lewis, head of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, told reporters in a conference call that ACORN does not support criminal activity and that it thinks the filmmakers should have obeyed Maryland laws. In the state, where one video that embarrassed ACORN was made, the act constituted illegal wiretapping, the suit says.

The videos airing in the past two weeks show ACORN housing counselors advising two young conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute on how to conceal their criminal business.

If I wasn’t so sure that they are, at worst, a criminal enterprise and, at best, election fraud purveyors, I could almost feel sorry for them. But they are, and I’m not.

The blogosphere has been lit up by the reaction to the suit announcement.

One seemingly good analysis come from a reader at NRO’s The Corner. Here is just a taste:

ACORN’s legal theory is very, very thin. Their only cause of action is for a violation of the Maryland wiretapping statute. I’m certainly no expert on that statute, and I have no opinion as to whether Giles and O’Keffe violated it. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume they did. The violation of a criminal statute does not automatically give rise to civil liability in the absence of an express statutory provision that creates a private cause of action.

[...]

Fourth, even if the defendants don’t plead any counterclaims, the scope of discovery against ACORN will be incredibly broad, as it almost always is in civil litigation. ACORN has far, far more to lose from what could come out during discovery than what they are asking for in this suit.

My favorite comment, so far, at AoSHQ (which led me to the NRO post) is this one:

Sounds like ACORN’s legal advice is as sound as their tax advice.

True.

More, I am sure, to come.

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