So today I got a letter sent to all Catholic Bishops in the U.S. announcing that due to serious problems at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the Catholic Campaign for Human Development is suspending all funds to ACORN.

It’s significant because the Catholic Church in the U.S. has given $7.3 million dollars to ACORN projects over the past decade. Just last year, U.S. Catholics gave more than a million dollars to ACORN. And it appears some of that money filtered down to the ACORN office in Las Vegas that made headlines trying to register the Dallas Cowboys football team to vote in Nevada.

The problem for the Catholics is two fold:

The Catholic Church is concerned about its own tax exempt status being involved in a group that is now so deeply involved in political support of one candidate.
The Catholic Church says questions have arisen about ACORNS financial management, fiscal transparency and accountability.

So, of course, I immediately called ACORN’s spokesperson Scott Levenson, one of many public relations specialists brought on by ACORN to fight all this bad press. And here is Scott’s response to the question about the Catholic Bishop’s suspending ACORN funding:

"The facts are wrong and we will no longer participate in a Drew Griffin hatchet job against ACORN.”

Less than an hour later, after our editorial director made a call to ACORN asking if this really was their response, we got this from another public relations specialist ACORN brought on to fight the bad press:

“ACORN is grateful to have received CCHD funding for many years, and proud that CCHD has enabled us to help our low income constituency achieve the American Dream. We know that CCHD is reviewing their current funding, and we are in discussions with them about continuing their support.” – Steve Kest, ACORN Executive Director

The tension over at ACORN must be so thick you could cut it with a …well, I guess a hatchet.

If you’ve been following our attempts to find out why so many ACORN voter registration forms are being turned in with apparently fraudulent information, you may have also seen my interview with ACORN’s chief organizer Bertha Lewis.
 

During our live interview I asked Ms. Lewis what ACORN was or is doing to prevent further voter registration fraud. She invited me to go to New York and see for myself.

Here is how the conversation went:

DREW: “Is there anything else you can do, in terms of greater openness to put these issues to rest? Can you open the books? Can we work this out?

Bertha Lewis/Acorn chief Organizer: “Sure, we want Drew or anyone, Drew come sit down in our office.”

Of course, immediately after the interview, my producer Kathleen Johnston, called to ask when we could come and sit down in Ms. Lewis’ office, in fact we asked if we could come tomorrow. That was 11 tomorrow’s ago. We are still in negotiations with ACORN as to what exactly Ms. Lewis meant by her “come sit down in our office” invitation. ACORN has hired a crisis management team and a public relations firm to help them handle the press. And so far, at least handling us, has meant to keep their office door closed.

I’ll keep you posted….negotiations continue.

10/13/08

Conventional thinking says poor people, minorities and the disenfranchised don’t vote because those in power try to make it as difficult as possible for these various groups to vote.

That is the reason ACORN, a far-left leaning consortium of community activism, decided this election cycle to aggressively register voters in America’s less affluent neighborhoods.

One of those areas is Lake County Indiana. For anyone outside of Indiana, this is Gary, a city of shuttered or crippling along steel mills, vacant store fronts and mostly black faces.

Vowing to make sure these forgotten faces get heard, ACORN initially sought to register as many as 45-thousand new voters in Lake County alone. That would have been tremendous given the county has just 300-thousand voters altogether.

Even so, when ACORN dropped off its pile of 5,000 new voter registration forms, the elections workers were elated. Both the republican and democratic workers inside the Lake County registrar’s office are excited about each new voter and were indeed hoping this election would be the one that ignited the kind of voter engagement that is our constitutional right.

But when they began peeling away the onion, so to speak, it started to rot. The first 2,100 voter applications were deemed fraud the other 2,900 were put aside. Now the Indiana Attorney General is being asked to investigate.

ACORN, which ran the voter drive, has tried to say allegations of voter registration fraud against ACORN is just another plot by those in power to keep those out of power from voting. No so. Having looked directly at the applications in question, I can tell you ACORN itself was defrauded by its own workers.

Paid to register voters, it appears all the ACORN workers did was fill in any old name, dead, made up or even a name on a fast food restaurant, and collect their pay.

Because every voter registration application must legally be reviewed, the workers in the Lake County Election’s office are spending 10 and 12 hour days trying to verify what they know are fake voter registration cards handed in by ACORN.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin greets supporters at a campaign rally in Carson City, Nevada.

Drew Griffin
CNN Special Investigations Unit

Immediately after Gov. Sarah Palin’s surprise unveiling as GOP vice presidential nominee - I was shocked that so many people – including pundits, e-mailers, talk show hosts and politicians - knew so much about her.

When I was given this assignment to produce an hour-long documentary on the Alaska governor, I had no idea who she was. To be perfectly honest I didn’t even know the governor of Alaska was a "she."

But apparently everyone else did, and they all had an opinion about her.

Of course the opinions were equally divided based on your political leanings. Democrats began e-mailing reporter types with their talking points: evil, vindictive, lightweight, a conservative Christian out to tell us how to breed, teach and read. In a word, dangerous.

Republican talking points included: outside-the-beltway, corruption fighter, executive experience. A real person grounded in family, country and apple pie. (Make that moose burgers). And, it turns out, the celebrity antidote to the Obama star factor.

Sarah Palin turns out to be much more human than either the Republicans or Democrats would have you believe.

What struck me most about Palin is how accidentally she fell into this business.

Sens. John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all deliberately entered politics as a career.

Palin entered the tiny world of her politics as a PTA mom-turned-city-council-member-turned mayor.

I am not naïve enough to believe she had no political ambition beyond Wasilla and the great state of Alaska.

But I am convinced her meteoric rise started with a mom’s simple involvement in her children schools. And if nothing else, that is refreshing in national politics.

What do you think? Use this blog to weigh in with your opinions on Sarah Palin.