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Truth in advertising: not everybody who tried to sting ACORN ended up with what they thought....

... and this story is actually about ACORN Delaware.

Nancy Armstrong is a disabled USN vet and a blogger out of Wichita KS, who is interested in investigating ACORN's funding sources. She is far less sensational than most, and--a pleasant rarity in the world today--actually reports factual information that would run counter to her original thesis.

Armstrong recently published an investigative post about where ACORN is finding the money to do foreclosure counseling, and she lays out the organization's profit or potential profit from a number of lawsuits, including actions acainst HSBC and Sherwin Williams. That's interesting, but not germane to my point today.

Armstrong apparentely attempted her own sting operation in June 2009 to discover what kind of response people who turn to ACORN for mortgage foreclosure help get.

What drew me to this post is that her target was ACORN Delaware. [Who knows why a woman in Kansas calls ACORN Delaware?]

Here's what she writes:

ACORN has become directly involved in stopping foreclosures by doing foreclosure counseling with “housing experts.” Recently I spoke with the ACORN Delaware office purposely representing myself as a person who is in foreclosure in the State of Delaware to elicit details of the counseling. The polite and knowledgeable representative in the ACORN Delaware office answered my questions in full.

I told her that I needed to forestall a foreclosure. She informed me there were documents that I need to provide to the ACORN office to go “through the foreclosure counseling process.”

Here is a list of those items I needed to provide at “my appointment”:

1. Current mortgage statement
2. 2008 Federal Tax Return
3. Sheriff’s Sale Date
4. Current W-2
5. If you are disabled they require the follwing documents:
a. Current VA Award Letter
b. Current SSI award Statement


Uh, gee--the polite and knowledgeable representative in the ACORN Delaware office?

And for an intake interview, look at the documents required. Precisely what you would expect for somebody to make an initial determination of whether they could help you.

But, strangely enough, no major blogs or outlets for the MSM have ever picked up Ms. Armstrong's post.

Sometimes that can be written off to the fact that there is no news when things go the way they are supposed to go, but in this case it is also possible that ACORN has simply become to radioactive for the MSM to handle in any objective fashion. It's not middle class. It's pretty radical in its approach to a lot of issues. It has ugly corners while it is arguably doing some good work.

Easier to go with the pimp and the prostitute who were no more real than Ms. Armstrong's fictive Delaware citizen in foreclosure.

Here's my challenge for the members of our local blogosphere: if you are going to write about ACORN, write [as pretty much only Nancy Willing has heretofore done] about what's going on at ACORN Delaware. What are they doing and how well are they doing it?

What's fascinating is that the entire WNJ piece on the ACORN imbroglio last week only really covered comments positive [John Kowalko] or negative [Wayne Smith] on ACORN, without actually providing any independently garnered information on what ACORN Delaware does.

[If, like me, you can't read a quote in which Wayne Smith accuses someone else of having politicized issues without smiling, you may not have noticed the WNJ oversight in this regard.]

Comments

Hube said…
Nancy's always had a hard-on for Smith. Her rantings about his neighborhood schools bill years ago were at best incoherent.

Here's the difference between Smith saying something is "highly politicized" and some entity like ACORN saying something similar: The latter gets taxpayer money.
Anonymous said…
Why would anyone "pick up" Armstrong's post, when it offeres nothing of any value? So ACORN told her she needed to have certain documents for a foreclosure meeting. So what?
Nancy Willing said…
Interesting work, Steve. DE ACORN weren't aware that they had been 'in a sting' too.

Maybe this will get picked nationally. It should.



Hubie Cubie, defending Wayne is your thing :-). He is known up and down the state as the resegregation king.

Your BFF Smith cut out on his government obligations to line his pockets and the GOP lost his seat because of it. Plain and simple.

But, never fear, health insurance lobbyist Smith can be seen in Leg Hall from morn to night.

Never gives up the good corporate profit fight.
Hube said…
As I said Nance, you were incoherent then, and you're even moreso now. You constantly brag about your "educational background;" amazing that basic grammar and sentence structure were never included.

Oh, and you still haven't the foggiest about Smith. Just practically everything you profess to have a clue on.

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