I daresay you'll be as happy as I am to learn that when it comes to Congress defunding organizations who've broken laws, the ACORN won't have fallen far from the artillery (emphasis mine):
Going after ACORN may be like shooting fish in a barrel lately -- but jumpy lawmakers used a bazooka to do it last week and may have blown up some of their longtime allies in the process.
The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.
In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.
Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who's Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.
Awesome.
But wait--there is more, so much more. Who else has received tax dollars and broken laws? Well, as The Rude Pundit pointed out recently:
Some things are easy to put in perspective: We have a case in Albany, NY, where Catholic Charities funds were used as part of a settlement on a case of molestation by clergy. In Cleveland in 2002, at a Catholic Charities-supported child care center, five workers were arrested on charges of sexual abuse of children. The number of cases of molestation by workers, of the cloth or not, at Catholic Charities-run or -owned facilities could go on and on and on, as the abuse did for years.
In August of this year, Catholic Charities received a federal government contract for $100 million over five years to work with victims of natural disasters.
And the outrage is...where exactly?
Also at litbrit.
