ACORN Offshoot Tapped To Help With Multi-State ObamaCare ‘Navigator’ Drive

As if the roll-out of this slow motion trainwreck wasn’t catastrophic enough….(the massive incompetence of the Regime has been staggering.)

We now hear that Wade Rathke, the former activist for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who founded  ACORN, and is an Executive Board member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is now  providing navigators for ObamaCare. Rathke describes himself as someone who is dedicated to “winning social justice, workers’ rights, and a democracy where ‘the people shall rule’” – (i.e. he’s a Socialist.)  ACORN was shut down in 2009 after citizen journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles shined a much needed spotlight on their corrupt identity fraud and voter fraud operation. Prior to that,  our current POTUS had an intimate and longstanding association with the group.

It shouldn’t be a shock that the shady ACORN spin-off Rathke now leads, has been tapped to help people enroll in Obamacare exchanges but it should enrage American taxpayers  that members of the group are collecting taxpayer money for their work despite Congress’ efforts to cut ACORN and its affiliates off from government funding.

Fox News Reports:

The United Labor Unions Council Local 100, a New Orleans-based nonprofit, announced last month it would take part in a multi-state “navigator” drive to help people enroll in President Obama’s health care plan. The labor council was established by ACORN founder Wade Rathke after his larger group was broken up amid scandal in 2009 and banned from receiving taxpayer funds.

But the group went bankrupt after a journalist’s sting operation caught employees allegedly telling clients how to cheat on taxes, causing donations to dry up and lawmakers to cut off public funding.

Epstein said the ban on funding to ACORN-related groups was mysteriously dropped from the key Health and Human Services appropriations bill in the most recent continuing resolution, which Congress uses to fund the government absent formal budgets. He said there appears to be little oversight as to who gets Navigator grants.

The United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 100 is helping to navigate people into the marketplaces in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas under the Affordable Care Act. Republicans in Congress need to step up and do something about this.

Matthew Vadum of FrontPageMagazine helpfully notes that “ACORN is the nonprofit group that knowingly hired felons convicted of identity theft to work on voter registration drives, giving them custody of sensitive voter information.”

“Local 100′s role as a Navigator, suggest[s] the program is less about health care and more about building a new progressive infrastructure,” says longtime ACORN-watcher Mike Flynn of Breitbart.com.

The fact that Wade Rathke, a disreputable, radical left-wing community organizer, is allowed anywhere near the enrollment process ought to give all Americans pause. The only reason Rathke hasn’t been federally investigated for racketeering is because his allies control the federal law enforcement apparatus. President Obama pretends he has no connection to ACORN and Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t care what laws have been broken because he approves of ACORN’s goals.

But that’s not all folks – it actually gets worse…Obama is also collaborating secretly with ACORN bosses on housing policy.

Former officers of the disgraced radical group ACORN are still advising the Obama administration and guiding its catastrophic far-left policies almost three years after the group filed bankruptcy.

Former ACORN Housing public affairs director Bruce Dorpalen, who now runs the National Housing Resource Center (NHRC), has been meeting with and advising senior Obama administration officials on housing policy, according to good-government group Judicial Watch. The watchdog discovered the secret collaborations after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request.

Like a grifter running away from a criminal past, ACORN Housing formally changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA) after devastating undercover videos surfaced in 2009. In those videos, masterminded by conservative activists James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles, ACORN and ACORN Housing intake workers were shown providing advice on setting up a brothel for pedophiles and breaking other laws. The videos launched the late Andrew Breitbart’s website Big Government and generated leftist apoplexy across America.

At the time, ACORN apologists like Joe Conason, Rachel Maddow, David Sirota, and a menagerie of other media Marxists tried to defend ACORN by falsely claiming that the videos had been doctored. A year later the controlling entity in the ACORN network, ACORN Inc., filed bankruptcy after Congress canceled its taxpayer funding and left-wing foundations sprinted away from the group as hard as they could.

“How is it, after the scandals of ACORN and its contribution to the housing crash, that this organization’s former leadership is still able to guide federal housing policy?” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “It goes to show that Barack Obama truly is the president from ACORN.”

This helps explain Obama’s next cool hat trick-  Forced Integration Into Suburban Neighborhoods.

That Obama – always “fighting for the Middle Class,” huh?

Not Funny: ATF Manual Featured Picture Of Firing Squad To Warn Whistleblowers

Lost in all the Shutdown/debt ceiling furor of the past few days is a  Washington Times report about a chilling training manual photo that has gotten the Justice Department into hot water. The photo,  that was embedded in their annual Introduction to National Security Information online course for the ATF,  suggests federal agents could face a firing squad for leaking government secrets.

The Photo was obtained by the Washington Times from a concerned law enforcement official, and “immediately drew protests from watchdogs who said it showed a lack of sensitivity to gun violence and the continuing hostile environment toward whistleblowers.”

A photo in the online manual for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — complete with a photo of a turn-of-the-century firing squad — was obtained by The Washington Times from a concerned federal law enforcement official, and it immediately drew protests from watchdogs who said it showed a lack of sensitivity to gun violence and the continuing hostile environment toward whistleblowers.

Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblower Center, said the DOJ has forgotten about the protections of the First Amendment, which covers leaks to the media, and that the photo could scare its employees into self-censorship.

The photo “would have a chilling affect on legitimate speech. And some of the rhetoric used against whistleblowers could be construed as inciting to violence because they’ve turned up the rhetoric,” Mr. Kohn said.

Justice Department officials said the photo was included as a joke and that they were unaware it was viewed as offensive by agents. They plan to remove the entry, but not until the government shutdown is ended and federal officials return to work, said Richard Marianos, the special agent in charge of the Washington division of ATF.

In light of this Regime’s ongoing war against whistleblowers, the firing squad pic could hardly have been seen as a “joke”. It looks more like an a ham-fisted attempt at sending a message.

The Director of the National Whistleblower Center certainly wasn’t amused.

While the DOJ may be making light of a serious policy, Mr. Kohnsaid the photo was hypocritical, unconstitutional and unprofessional.

“The government leaks information all the time and they get away with it,” Mr. Kohn said. “They don’t go after leaks that they support. The government leaks, and when it is officially condoned they do not investigate or prosecute.”

A major incident that Mr. Kohn referenced was the case of former U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, who was removed from his position in Michigan by the DOJ after the DOJ leaked negative information about him.

“It significantly harmed his reputation, turned out not to be true, and we filed a privacy act lawsuit in 2003 and we are still fighting with the Justice Department to try to find out who the source of that leak was,” Mr. Kohn said. “They have used well over $1 million of taxpayer resources to cover up a DOJ employee who violated the law when he leaked information to defame a whistleblower and that’s one of the biggest problems with this whole campaign against leaks.”

An anonymous ATF agent at the Clean Up ATF forum commented,

“And to think, in early 2012, I got suspended for three days for having in my cubicle, in a discrete location, a printed-out sarcastic email from a former ATF GS, which my then-supervisor found “offensive.”  You actually had to look HARD to find the e-mail in question.  Meanwhile, another agent got away with mocking my line-of-duty injury by defacing a piece of mail addressed to me.

So, I applaud whoever complained about this asinine “slide” in the presentation.  The complainant actually got the attention of Main DOJ and Drudge Report.”

Gosh, it must be great fun working in law enforcement under this wretched Regime.