(Thomas Mitchell/4THST8
Mitt Romney apparently is making hay in a TV ad over the single ethics violation the Democrats could nail on Newt Gingrich — whether a college course he was teaching was advancing his partisan goals.
It’s sort of like concentrating on the mote in one eye and ignoring the beam in another.
There’s more than one way to advance one’s political goals. Newt’s penny-ante course is one. Obama’s million-dollar extortion to fund his disgraced and disbanded cronies at Acorn is another.
Nearly a month ago, Investor’s Business Daily first reported that Obama’s Justice Department, under Eric Holder, ordered Bank of America to turn over $355 million in discrimination fines to various community organizing groups — nothing more than reassembled Acorn “clones.”
The bank’s mortgage division was accused of discriminating against minorities. “Funds not passed out to alleged victims after two years will be handed out to ‘qualified’ groups unconnected to the case that provide credit and housing counseling and similar services to blacks and Hispanics in areas where the discrimination allegedly occurred,” the IBD news account explained.
The story quoted Heritage Foundation fellow Ernest Istook as saying, “It’s a shakedown. This is another political backdoor to use the government to channel money to your friends.”
Istook, a former GOP congressman from Oklahoma, added, “They are creating a grant program, unsupervised by Congress, unconstrained by any government safeguards or accountability and with no guidelines to control or restrict the Department of Justice in giving or withholding approval of who gets the money.”
Today, an IBD editorial reported that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith is looking into the tactic by Holder.
In a Jan. 25 letter, Smith wrote, “I am concerned that the terms of the Justice Department’s recent settlement with Countrywide Financial (bought out by BofA) will allow the department to give large sums of money to individuals and organizations with questionable backgrounds or close political ties to the White House without any guidelines or oversight.
“If that is to be the case,” he said, “this sort of backdoor funding of the president’s political allies would be an abuse of the department’s law enforcement authority.”
That’s putting it mildly. It is extortion of financial institutions in order to fund outlaw bands of Obama backers from Acorn-like organizations. For example, Acorn Housing Corp. got some $700,000 in federal money after changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America, IBD reported.
Remember what Judge Don Mosley said when he fined the Las Vegas chapter of Acorn $5,000 for election fraud:
“It is making a mockery of our election process. If I had an individual in this courtroom … who was responsible for this kind of thing, I would put that person in prison for 10 years, hard time, and not think twice about it. To me this is reprehensible. This is the kind of thing you see in some banana republic, Uruguay or someplace, not in the United States.”
Too bad the Republican candidates are too busy shouting at each others’ motes.
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