There’s another big story that looks pretty damning for ACORN in today’s Washington Post — “ACORN Funded Political, For-Profit Efforts, Data Show“:

ACORN’s tax-exempt groups and allied organizations, long a target of conservative ire, used more than half their charitable and public money in 2006 to pay other ACORN affiliates, according to an analysis by the tax staff of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).
On Thursday, Grassley called the transactions a “big shell game” and said ACORN donors may be surprised by how the liberal group known for helping the poor obtain housing and health care was spending their money. He urged the Internal Revenue Service to take a closer look.
According to the Grassley report, charities “are being used to raise monies which are then funneled to other charities or to other organizations for purposes other than what the donor may have intended. . . . Dollars raised for charitable [purposes] appear to be used for impermissible lobbing and political activity.”

1) Notice this is in the Post because it was packaged and given to them by Senator Grassley’s office. I’m glad the Post isn’t ignoring the story, but what’s it going to take for them to look into this stuff on their own?

2) The subhead for the story is “Actions Were Before Leadership Change.” Were the editors sitting around saying, “Hmm, this looks really bad for ACORN. How early in the story can we make a gratuitously apologetic point on behalf of the organization? What’s that? The subhead? GENIUS.” Maybe it should be mentioned somewhere that what Grassley is accusing the organization of didn’t occur under the present leadership, but it’s not like those in charge of ACORN now are running an especially tight ship necessitating they be judged relative to their predecesors.

3) This “shell game” that Grassley is accusing ACORN of is played by many, many lefty activist groups. Heck, I first became politically active in college when I became aware that the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group — PIRGs are an old Ralph Nader organization — was taking involuntary fees from University of Oregon students and laundering them through a couple of different organizations and using them to illegally lobby on behalf of a bunch of far-left stuff I and many other students didn’t support. (By the way, PIRGs are another insitutionally corrupt community organization that the president has worked for — see my NRO article “Barack’s PIRG Past.”) Maybe the tax stuff isn’t as exciting as the undercover prositution stings, but boy is it rampant.