BeardedBruce, thank you for the article.

That situation should definitely be investigated, and anyone involved with fraudulent applications should be prosecuted.

I did see this in there:

ACORN's other major activity is housing aid, for which it is eligible for federal grants from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under newly enacted affordable-housing provisions.

Nevada Sen. John Ensign, a Republican, on Tuesday called for the suspension of the affordable housing funds because they might be going to "controversial groups like ACORN."

Note that Ensign "called for the suspension of the affordable housing funds because they might be going to controversial groups like ACORN."

That's wrong, wrong, wrong on two counts: The "might be" without more proof shouldn't be a ground for suspension, and "controversial" doesn't necessarily mean "wrongful" or "criminal" or "guilty" or whatever. If it can be shown that ACORN's management set things up with intent to create and file fraudulent registrations, or committed what might be called "negligent fraud" by purposely undersupervising registration operations, then the ACORN officials should be punished, of course. But the actual housing aid operation should not be made to suffer because there is controversy over the registration effort.

Actually, "suspension of the affordable housing funds" sounds to me as if he's asking for suspension of those funds as to other organizations than ACORN because the funds "might be" going to "controversial" groups. That sounds to me like a pretextual attack on the very idea of affordable housing.

Dave Oesterreich