Salon's Inept Defense of ACORN and Tainted Obama Nominee

For some in the left-wing mainstream media the truth is too much to handle. I am referring specifically to Salon.com's Alex Koppelman who is gunning for a spot on the list of "useful idiots" defending organized crime syndicate ACORN. (Salon's Joe Conason is already on the list.)

Koppelman didn't like what I wrote yesterday about Patrick Corvington working for the ACORN-friendly Annie E. Casey Foundation so he decided to accuse me of "sloppy reporting." It is a strange allegation to make, especially since he does not accuse me of making a factual error. He essentially admits in his piece that he didn't like the conclusions I arrived at so he simply went around the accuracy issue altogether and smeared me. It's all so typical of the left.

I'm guessing Koppelman felt compelled to act because my blog post got significant play in the media. It was cited by the Washington Examiner which in turn was cited by the Drudge Report.

Before I go farther, some background is needed here.

Who is Patrick Corvington? On Feb. 11 the Senate confirmed Corvington, an Obama nominee, as chief executive of the (useless) Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America. CNCS is beloved by America's parasitic activist left because it is the federal “service” agency that doles out millions of dollars to left-leaning groups every year.

Corvington was a senior official at the very, very left-wing Annie E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore, Md., which  granted funding to ACORN and other radical groups during his tenure. If Corvington didn’t share the views of the foundation, which promotes racial disharmony and opposes placing juveniles charged with crimes in pretrial detention, he almost certainly couldn’t have gotten a job there. In his rush to defend ACORN it didn't seem to occur to Koppelman that Corvington would not have fit in at the Annie E. Casey Foundation unless he embraced its radical left-wing goals.

It is amazing to me that the Obama administration would want to hire someone --especially to head a well-endowed grant making agency-- who was connected in any way to the criminals who run ACORN. Simply astounding.

If Koppelman wanted to disagree with me on my assertion that Corvington's employment at the foundation tainted him and made him in effect a "friend" of ACORN, he should have done so and explained his reasoning. Instead, Koppelman changed the subject and attacked my reporting skills, accusing me of sloppiness. It's very tedious.

By the way, one of the more sinister programs the Annie E. Casey Foundation has funded is the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI). American Spectator's Joseph Lawler wrote an excellent profile for Capital Research Center (my employer) of the JDAI, a program vigorously supported by the Casey Foundation. Lawler wrote

JDAI is a mammoth philanthropic endeavor. In 2007, the most recent year for which information is available, the Casey Foundation dedicated $5.4 million to juvenile justice programs, almost all of which supported the replication of the JDAI system in counties across America. By advising counties that their systems of juvenile detention are overcrowded, too costly, inefficient and racially discriminatory, the Casey Foundation’s JDAI weakens government’s ability to fight crime and increases the chance that juvenile offenders will eventually become adult criminals and prisoners.

The Casey Foundation funds this anti-social program that endangers the public by keeping dangerous young offenders on the streets. The reckless theory is that detaining youths before trial turns them into criminals. It's unclear if the foundation embraces this perspective because it is part of the liberal let's-hug-criminals-till-they-reform school or part of the more radical incarceration-is-a-tool-of-systemic-capitalist-oppression school. (My guess is the latter.)

The Casey Foundation is also convinced that the justice system is systemically racist.

In 2006 it published a report titled: "Race Matters: Unequal Opportunity Within Criminal Justice." As DiscoverTheNetworks notes

This study concluded that the U.S. justice system is rife with "embedded racial inequities" that "work against women and men of color"; "racial stereotyping and discrimination"; "disproportionality at every step of the criminal justice process"; "statutory biases"; "poverty's interaction with race in criminal defense"; "disproportionate imprisonment"; "differential post-release consequences"; "disparate impact on families and children"; and "disparate impact on neighborhoods."

Patrick Corvington, someone who worked for a vile, America-hating, left-wing foundation, is now going to be overseeing grants to similarly vile, America-hating, left-wing activist groups.

And Salon's Alex Koppelman couldn't care less.

(Addendum: Mark Hemingway of the Washington Examiner responds to Koppelman's drivel here.)