A few weeks ago we reported on how the Services Employees International Union was attempting to fix the vote in Sonoma County, California so that Sonoma’s in-home healthcare workers would end up with SEIU representation instead of NUHW representation.

Well, Sonoma wasn’t an isolated case. The SEIU used the same vote fixing tactics in Fresno County.

Andy Stern’s SEIU is playing hardball, using techniques that harken back to the mob-infested old days in order to win the game of representation. And THIS is the guy that President Obama is taking close counsel from? A goon. A thug. A mob-like hitman.

It’s the Chicago Way, alright. From Chicago to Fresno and Sonoma Counties all the way to the White House. This president and his cronies are instituting mob action everywhere they go.

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Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night, and he had barely won his stronghold in Oswego County.

As it turns out, neither was true.

But Hoffman’s concession — based on snafus in Oswego County and elsewhere that left his vote undercounted — set off a chain of events that echoed all the way to Washington, D.C., and helped secure passage of a historic health care reform bill.

Democratic Rep. Bill Owens was quickly sworn into office on Friday, a day before the rare weekend vote in the House of Representatives. His support sealed his party’s narrow victory on the health care legislation.

Now a recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections.

In Oswego County, where Hoffman was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, inspectors found Hoffman actually won by 1,748 votes — 12,748 to 11,000.

The new vote totals mean the race will be decided by absentee ballots, of which about 10,200 were distributed, said John Conklin, communications director for the state Board of Elections.

Under a new law in New York that extended deadlines, military and overseas ballots received by this coming Monday (and postmarked by Nov. 2) will be counted. Standard absentee ballots had to be returned this past Monday.

The state hasn’t certified the election yet, but Nancy Pelosi wasted no time swearing in Bill Owens. Owens then, of course, registered one more Democratic vote for Obama’s government run health care. If all the ballots are counted, and the result is changed, then Owens will have to be removed.

With all of this in mind, Doug Hoffman has un-conceded. His victory could still be a long shot, but with 10,000 ballots to be counted, it’s entirely possible that the result could be different. This could be huge for conservatives if Hoffman wins — and it should serve as a powerful lesson to never concede until every ballot is counted.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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There’s not much that union supporters and I can agree upon. But here is one incident where I can wholeheartedly support the aggrieved members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) who have found themselves victims of their own union.

The SEIU wanted to renegotiate a contract with officials of Sonoma County, California for its in-home healthcare workers supported by county funds. SEIU representatives met with and crafted a new contract with the assistance of County officials. This was all done behind closed doors without the general knowledge of or the assistance of the workers themselves.

But that isn’t the main problem here. It’s how the contract was approved that shows how little the SEIU cares for democracy, member’s rights, and the American way.

First of all, the SEIU tried to prevent the members from voting and having a say in the contract. Unions officials changed the voting rules in an effort to drive down participation by members. The SEIU went so far as to hire thuggish “security guards” to prevent members from entering the county facilities where the vote was taking place. Then, the SEIU carefully instructed those that were “allowed” into the facilities on how they must vote. This vote was entirely rigged by the SEIU with the tacit approval of Sonoma County officials. Additionally, the SEIU never provided the actual contract ahead of the vote so members could see what was in it and steadfastly refused to provide any information about the contract to members.

The fact is, the SEIU orchestrated a sham vote on the contract, squelched its member’s voices and stomped on nearly every American right in the process.

In an email to me on this issue it was asked, “I wonder how SEIU’s Andy Stern can possibly square SEIU’s supposed advocacy for ‘employee free choice’ with SEIU’s vote rigging and voter intimidation practiced against his own members. Would you trust SEIU to run your city council or municipal elections? Not me.” I have to agree with this question, of course, and have asked the same questions myself many times.

Now, doesn’t this all sound like Obama’s Washington, Pelosi’s House of Representatives and Harry Reid’s Senate? Doesn’t this sound like the same sort of un-American style perpetrated by the Obama administration — its “Chicago way” if you will?

But the essential anti-American, anti-democratic actions of the Obama administration should not surprise anyone when looked at through the prism of the actions of the SEIU under President Andy Stern. After all, Stern is the single most frequent visitor of the White House as the recent release of the White House visitor records have shown. With Stern’s 22 visits to the White House, one cannot help but recall that old adage “birds of a feather flock together.”

A new healthcare worker’s union that split from the SEIU, The NUHW, is hosting an interesting video featuring some of the SEIU members that were so ill treated by their own union leaders. The video also shows that County officials were taken aback by the SEIU’s actions.

The NUHW also has a webpage filled with interesting violations of common decency perpetrated by the SEIU.

Now I do not support these members in the details of their complaint against the contract, to be sure. They are, of course, complaining about cuts in their benefits. That, I have no problem with. In fact, I’d likely support deeper cuts in their over generous California benefits. The simple fact of the matter is that California cannot afford luxurious benefits to be given to in-home healthcare workers. As a matter of fact, I don’t support a state giving any benefits at all to in-home healthcare workers.

But that is not why I am supporting these workers. These workers have every right to expect their union to negotiate their new contract with the full participation of the members. They have every right to expect that the union will provide them with all relevant information as to what will be in the very contract upon which they will be called to vote. And, above all, they should expect their union to allow them unfettered access to the ballot box so that they can vote their conscience on that new contract.

The SEIU’s actions are un-American in the extreme and these union members have been sorely mistreated by the Service Employees International Union.

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The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.

Several federal and local politicians would like the city to challenge the decision in court. They say voter apathy is the largest barrier to black voters’ election of candidates they prefer and that the Justice Department has gone too far in trying to influence election results here. Stephen LaRoque, a former Republican state lawmaker who led the drive to end partisan local elections, called the Justice Department’s decision “racial as well as partisan.” “On top of that, you have an unelected bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., overturning a valid election,” he said. “That is un-American.”

The decision, made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, has irritated other locals as well. They bristle at federal interference in this city of nearly 23,000 people, two-thirds of whom are black.

In interviews in sleepy downtown Kinston – a place best known as a road sign on the way to the Carolina beaches – residents said partisan voting is largely unimportant because people are personally acquainted with their elected officials and are familiar with their views.

More here

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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Not long ago, Pam Geller told the story of an ACORN office in Florida that had destroyed all the Republican voter registration forms it had gotten during a 2008 voter registration drive.

Geller had a first-hand account of this crime from one Fathiyyah Muhammad, an Obama voter that is a registered Republican. She is also an African-American.

“This is my first experience” with ACORN, Muhammad said. “This was before Obama got the nomination, long before then….I heard about this group that was paying $3.00 per person, to go out and to get people to sign up to vote. So I went over, I thought that well this is a good way to make some money because I know everybody, you know. I went over there and this guy signed me up and everything, and gave me my little pad, all this stuff.”

Muhammad dutifully went out and registered a bunch of Republican voters in Jacksonville and returned to the ACORN office to turn in her results. However, the ACORN representatives were incensed to find out that her registrations were for Republicans and not Democrats.

She saw ACORN officials in Jacksonville throw out the Republican registrations she made. “They just discarded those, they weren’t valid. All of the registrations… they just threw those out.” Yet she says that she is sure that the people she registered were actually going to vote: “Yes, they all were going to vote, I just didn’t want to get anybody just to get the three dollars, I wasn’t desperate for three dollars.”

ACORN is not in the business of registering voters. ACORN is in the business of enlarging Democrat voter rolls and it doesn’t matter to them how they do it.

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The Department of Justice has for the second time rejected Georgia’s system of using Social Security numbers and driver’s license data to check whether prospective voters are citizens.

The Justice Department first rejected Georgia’s request for preclearance for the checks in May. The state in August asked the Justice Department to reconsider that rejection.

Georgia and a number of other states with a history of discriminatory voting practices must preclear any changes to election rules with the Justice Department under the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Of course they did. Why would we want to know if a person is legally eligible  to vote, especially when they tend to vote Democrat. Yet, Democrats are the same people who whined incessantly about voter fraud in 2000, 2002, and 2004. Heck, they accused Republicans of voter fraud even when they won in 2006.

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On the website of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) a press release from Obama’s U.S. Census Bureau Director, Robert Groves, can be found. That press release appears to make obvious that the Bureau plans to count illegal aliens in our census. The press release was issued to America’s Hispanic organizations to urge them to help with the coming census.

In that press release, Groves says the following (my bold):

We have the enormous challenge of convincing everyone in the country to participate in the national count – regardless of race, ethnicity or citizenship status. To reach the Latino community, we are counting on community-based initiatives like ya es hora to partner with us in spreading the word that the 2010 Census is easy, important and safe,” said U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Groves.

Notice that Graves says “regardless of citizenship status.” With this comment it is clear that Graves intends to count illegals in our census.

The Census Bureau intends to work closely with groups that cater to illegals in this country to calculate the national count. The Census Bureau hopes to have success by launching a campaign that will “enhance the Bureau’s efforts to count Latinos through a sustained and aggressive community education initiative to mobilize hundreds of local organizations.”

Why is this such a big deal? Because this will add to the federal funds that will flow to areas that now have officially counted, lower income people, federal funds that will naturally flow into the coffers of Democrats and their cohorts.

Worse, it will add false numbers to our national count and will be one more step toward legalizing people that have broken our laws to get here. Once these people become instant American citizens they will, of course, largely vote Democrat and we will have millions more voters that will be amenable to voting for programs of federal giveaways and freebies to themselves. The Democrat’s power will grow exponentially and our country will be lowered even further as a result.

Illegal aliens should not be counted in the census. Their presence here is illegal and must not be used to direct federal dollars to the areas in which they serve as illegal squatters. Unfortunately, it looks like Obama’s Census Bureau intends to illicitly count illegal aliens as American citizens.

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Dozens of forged and fraudulent absentee ballots from people registered to vote on the Working Families Party line were filed in the Sept. 15 primary elections in Troy [New York], the Times Union has learned.

Many of the questionable ballots were filed under the names of students and people who live in government-subsidized housing and other downtown areas. Still others were submitted on behalf of voters who were alleged to have signed the ballots earlier this month, but those people have not lived in New York state for at least a year, records show.

Documents at the county Board of Elections show the fraudulent ballots were handled by or prepared on behalf of various elected officials and leaders and operatives for the Democratic and Working Families parties.

As the Times Union doesn’t bother to note:

The Working Families Party is not about working people or families and it isn’t really a party. The WFP is a wholly owned subsidiary of ACORN. Bertha Lewis co-chair of the Working Families Party is the Executive Director of New York ACORN. New York ACORN leader, Steven Kest was the moving force in forming the party and WFP headquarters are located at the same address as ACORN’s national and New York office at 88 Third Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

WFP is essentially a money funnel which pays for an aggressive door to door canvas. Largely funded by unions, the WFP is ACORN’s “political arm” in New York State. Candidates supported by the Working Families Party and issues supported by ACORN are both advocated on the door steps of target voter homes as they share one major voter canvas.

This would be the same ACORN Obama surreptitiously paid $800,000 for election services during the 2008 campaign.

In the aftermath of the O’Keefe/Giles videos, the Senate voted 83-7 to limit the torrent of taxpayer money flooding into ACORN’s coffers. This means nothing. WFP is just one of literally hundreds of front groups ACORN hides behind.

Nothing short of a RICO investigation will rid the country of this rapidly metastasizing cancer. Good luck getting one past the Attorney General with the former Senator From ACORN residing in the White House. If our rulers would be brazen enough to kill an investigation into Black Panther goons intimidating voters at the polls, the odds of them digging up ACORN by the roots are nil. The same corrupt thugs indulging in the same crimes will continue to wallow in our money under different names.

Hat tip: Big Government, on a tip from Jay Guevara. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Conyers and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts asked the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service on Tuesday to provide an analysis on several aspects of ACORN. Among them:

• Any current or previous criminal investigations into the group.

• A breakdown of any funding received by the group and any violations of the terms of that funding.

• A report on alleged improprieties in collecting voter-registration forms and “the extent … that resulted in people being improperly placed on voting roles and actually attempting to vote.”

• The group’s programs to provide housing opportunities.

It also asked for a report on private sting activities “in which individuals have reportedly visited ACORN offices, misrepresented their identities and proposed activities, surreptitiously videotaped resulting conversations with ACORN workers, and widely distributed them.”

The letter went onto say, “Conflicting allegations have been made about the propriety of these activities. Please research and report on the federal and state laws that could apply to such videotaping and distribution of conversations without the consent of all parties.”

For having made it impossible to ignore the character of the people who have taken over our government, O’Keefe and Giles are among the greatest patriots this country has seen since the Revolution. As a reward, they will probably spend the rest of their lives paying off their legal bills.

On a tip from J. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Officials with the controversial community organizing group ACORN were secretly videotaped offering to assist two individuals posing as a pimp and a prostitute, encouraging them to lie to the Internal Revenue Service and providing guidance on how to claim underage girls from South America as dependents.

The videotape was made public Thursday on BigGovernment.com, a political blog launched by Andrew Breitbart as a companion site to his BigHollywood.breitbart.com blog.

In the videotape, made on July 24, James O’Keefe, a 25-year-old independent filmmaker, posed as a pimp with a 20-year-old woman named “Kenya” who posed as a prostitute while visiting ACORN’s office in Baltimore. The couple told ACORN staffers they wanted to secure housing where the woman could continue to maintain a prostitution business. …

On the videotape, “Kenya” can be seen telling an ACORN staffer that she earns roughly $8,000 a month. The ACORN employee then suggests to “Kenya” that ACORN could submit a tax return for 2008 showing that she made $9,600 for the entire year — instead of $96,000 — and that ACORN would charge “Kenya” $50 instead of the usual $150 fee for preparing her taxes.

ACORN offers tax preparation and benefits application services free of charge during tax season; it charges nominal fees during non-tax season.

The ACORN staffer can also be seen suggesting that the prostitute list her occupation as a freelance “performing artist.”

It gets worse…

The “pimp” later says that he and “Kenya” plan to bring up to 13 “very young” girls from El Salvador to work as prostitutes. Although an ACORN staffer points out their plans are illegal, she also suggests that the girls can be claimed as dependents.

“What if they are going to be making money because they are performing tricks too?” the pimp says.

“If they making money and they are underage, then you shouldn’t be letting anybody know anyway,” the ACORN staffer says, and laughs. “It’s illegal. So I am not hearing this, I am not hearing this. You talk too much. Don’t give up no information you’re not asked.”

ACORN thugs don’t just turn a blind eye to child prostitution. Here they offer to buy the brothel at taxpayer expense:

A second ACORN employee can be heard on the audiotape suggesting that the couple join the organization for an annual cost of $120 prior to attending one of its first-time homebuyer seminars, which are underwritten with taxpayer funds.

ACORN is best known for its industrial scale voter fraud operations, but also had a key role in causing the current financial mess by extorting banks into giving home loans to people unlikely to pay them back. It has been entrusted with collecting census data that will advance the Democrats’ political objectives.

American Thinker wonders “why Attorney General Holder hasn’t managed to institute a RICO investigation against this multi-state criminal enterprise.” The answer of course is that his boss is a product of ACORN. Comrade Obama trained ACORN thugs and provided legal assistance for their shakedown operations. His ties to this organization are so tight that he used to be known as the Senator From ACORN.

Obama’s campaign paid ACORN $800,000 for its voter fraud activities, then tried to cover it up. But that’s chump change compared to what he’s funneling ACORN’s way now that he has the keys to the treasury. The bloated spending bill the media helped him pass off as a “stimulus package” included $billions for ACORN.

Given Comrade Obama’s extremely close relationship with these goons, this story makes Watergate look like a parking violation. We’ll see if the mainstream media finds it worth mentioning.

On a tip from citizen222. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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