Feds Gave ACORN Half a Million for ‘Fire Prevention’

(Warner Todd Huston/The Union Label) – Jonathan Strong of Daily Caller has another sad tale of massive government waste involving the criminal group ACORN.

Everybody knows about ACORN, the dead, but not really dead activist group charged with all sorts of improprieties and illegalities, the most significant of which is voter fraud, including registering Mickey Mouse to vote.

But how did ACORN, a “grassroots reform” group, get grant money reserved mostly for local fire departments to do “fire prevention” work?

This is a story of how a bureaucratic office can override the recommendations of its own experts and award taxpayer dollars to an organization with no experience or credentials, resulting in sheer, utter waste.

The tale begins in 2007, when the ACORN Institute, an affiliate of ACORN, applied for a $1 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), part of the Department of Homeland Security….

The tale is sure to infuriate anyone interested on good government. But it isn’t just bureaucratic waste at work here. It isn’t just some badly administered program we are talking about here. It is also not uncommon. In fact, this sort of criminal waste happens every day.

But be certain to understand one thing, here. It does not happen with conservative groups. This sort of criminal waste only happens with these so-called community groups and ALL of them are left-wingers. It is, of course, the way the left works. They create these false front organizations and then start flooding the government with demands for funding. Because they have so many friendly Democrats in office they usually get it, too. On top of that, these groups start so many different groups that even the government can’t keep up with who they are.

Last year I wrote a piece about ACORN founder Wade Rathke’s dozens of different false front organizations that he had registered in order to get government funding. I came up with dozens and these just in the state of Louisiana, all of which was getting funding from the state. This is going on all across the country in every state and with the federal government.

The solution? Eliminate all the funding for these so-called community groups at every level. If these groups want money for their left-wing projects let them raise it from donors, not our taxes. These groups are a symptom of our growing welfare state.