As ACORN gears up to use your tax dollars to influence future elections, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is conducting a “massive” probe of ACORN Housing Corp., a source familiar with the ongoing investigation says.

A spokesman for HUD’s inspector general refused to confirm or deny whether ACORN Housing was being investigated.

ACORN Housing is essential to ACORN’s member recruitment program. The housing affiliate strongly encourages its clients to pay ACORN $120 a year to be part of the class struggle. Many of the ACORN employees Americans saw on the undercover prostitution sting videos last fall are actually ACORN Housing employees.

The HUD probe comes as ACORN Housing, the best-funded of ACORN’s affiliates, participates in the ACORN network-wide rebranding aimed at duping funders and the public and allowing ACORN to continue to devour government grants.

Although ACORN is now converting state chapters into new shell corporations operated out of the same old ACORN offices and staffed by many of the same people, ACORN Housing opted simply to change its name.

ACORN’s latest public relations ruse may give it an opportunity to take in untold millions of taxpayer dollars under cover of darkness just in time to cause trouble during the 2012 election cycle.

Interestingly there was little variation by party identification with a majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents all agreeing that the debt owed by the United States to China poses the greater threat.  Opinion was consistent across all other major demographic and political sub-groups.

This question was asked in a Zogby Interactive survey of 2,068 U.S. adults conducted from Feb. 17-19, 2010. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.2%. Here are the results:

When you think about the long-term security and well-being of the U.S., which of these do you believe is a more serious threat?

WASHINGTON (March 10, 2010) – After the collapse of the Senate amnesty bill in 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) joined with the National Council of La Raza and others to launch a campaign to smear the three largest mainstream groups making a case for tighter enforcement and lower immigration. At the center of this campaign was the designation of the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a “hate group” and the spread of that taint to Numbers USA and the Center for Immigration Studies. The announced goal was to pressure journalists and policymakers not to meet or speak with these organizations. Touted as an effort to “stop the hate,” it was a thinly disguised move to stifle debate.

CIS will release a report next week examining the SPLC and its role in this campaign. “Immigration and the SPLC: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Invented a Smear, Served La Raza, Manipulated the Press, and Duped its Donors,” authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Jerry Kammer, will be released at a panel discussion on Thursday, March 18, at 9:30 a.m. at the Murrow Room of the National Press Club, 14th & F streets NW. The report will be online at www.cis.org.

“Is Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead simply glib and superficial?”

Some thirty years ago now, it was one of the English essay questions put to me in my final year at high school. My written answer—‘Yes’—was perhaps itself a little glib and superficial and deserving of its low mark. But I was eighteen years old and going for the laugh. I suspect they would not ask such questions these days, for it would be deemed too demanding, too excluding, too elitist, too unfair. After all, it would require a pupil to read, comprehend, think, and write. Heaven forbid. In the eyes of the liberal-left that simply will not do.

To elevate or dumb down, this is the issue. And given the grey and spoon-fed nature of our age—in which no-one may excel or do better than the rest—it will be presented in a bite-sized and multiple-choice format with reference books allowed. Nothing too challenging, you understand. That would be to infringe individual rights, to raise the sight too high. It is all part of the liberal-left agenda. They claim to want everyone to start from the same point. What in fact they desire is for everyone to end there. How bleak and dull. How uninspiring. Small wonder our students prefer to sniff solvent.

A British Airways employee accused of funding terrorism and planning suicide bombings — including his own — appeared in court Thursday.

Prosecutor Colin Gibb called the suspect, Rajib Karim, “a very dangerous individual, facing very serious offenses and likely to face a serious term of imprisonment.”

Authorities said Karim — who was born in Bangladesh and is now a British citizen — collected money in Britain and sent it to Yemen and Bangladesh to fund terrorist activities.

British authorities believe he had significant success in financing terrorist operations, security sources with knowledge of the case told CNN.

He volunteered to recruit suicide bombers and to be one himself, prosecutors said in court. He said he would go to Yemen or Pakistan for training, they charged.

Karim, 30, is charged with two counts of engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts and fundraising for the purpose of terrorism, London’s Metropolitan Police Service said Wednesday. He appeared in Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Thursday.

Karim, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is an information technology developer for British Airways, authorities have said.

This could be the year that the number of babies born to minorities in America outnumbers babies born to whites.

That’s because immigration has boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years. Hispanic women have an average 2.99 children to 1.87 among white women. In 2008, 48 percent of the children born in the U.S. were minorities.

Sociology professor Kenneth Johnson of the University of New Hampshire says by mid-century, census projections suggest that America “may become a minority-majority country.” But at the moment, whites make up two-thirds of the total population.

The birth numbers highlight the nation’s growing racial and age divide. There are strong implications for the 2010 population count, which begins in earnest next week.

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is announcing protests across America to be conducted on April 15, 2010 in conjunction with existing Tea Party events in protest of the current push for Amnesty legislation in Washington and as a counter measure to the ‘March For America’ marches held nationally on March 21 by bill sponsor Luis Gutierrez.

“Despite the fake polls, bought and paid for by the Open Borders Lobby groups, the truth remains that 80% of Americans oppose Amnesty for illegal aliens and turning millions of illegals into voters would have a catastrophic effect on America,” said William Gheen of ALIPAC. “We will be sending tens of thousands of people out to support Tea Party events on April 15 to properly represent public opposition to illegal immigration and Amnesty for illegals.”

ALIPAC helped build the initial success of Tea Party events in April and July 2009 by leading a coalition of over 20 immigration enforcement groups behind the effort.

On November 14, 2009, ALIPAC directed “Tea Parties Against Amnesty” which rapidly organized protests in over 50 American cities and towns successfully pushing Congressman Luis Guitierez back from his original dates to file his Amnesty bill.

“This time we have let Gutierrez make his move first,” said William Gheen. “We are moving into position to channel the massive public backlash against Gutierrez’s ‘Marches for America’, which are designed to pass Amnesty for illegal aliens. Our counter protests will be in the Tea Party events on April 15.”

ALIPAC is revamping and re releasing the website www.AgainstAmnesty.com, which is designed to coordinate the April 15 events. The website was used for the first round of Tea Party Against Amnesty events in 2009.

Thomas Jefferson was no George Washington, but he was nonetheless quite a brilliant member of the Founding Fathers and perhaps the most gifted writer of the group.  One of the things about which he expressed his opinion most often was the subject of debt as it affected the new United States of America.

As Jefferson said in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, written in the early 19th Century:

“To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.”

It is nothing short of astonishing how prescient these men were. Thomas Jefferson went on in yet another missive to Kercheval, clearly an effective sounding board for Jefferson in his thoughts regarding debt:

“[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”

MEDFORD — A Wolf Creek man has been sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for masterminding a large-scale marijuana garden staffed by armed illegal immigrants he recruited from California.

Henry Xavier Villa, 54, was sentenced Monday in Medford’s U.S. District Court for growing 8,918 marijuana plants on his 160-acre property in Wolf Creek. The property also was seized by the federal government in a forfeiture action.

Drug Enforcement Administration investigators determined Villa’s crop was valued at approximately $6 million, according to a press release from prosecuting U.S. Attorney Judith R. Harper.

“Like several marijuana grows we’ve encountered, there was millions of dollars involved,” Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters said Tuesday.

The case began in 2007 when DEA agents, with help from several local law enforcement agencies, including the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office and Ashland police, raided Villa’s property.

They encountered three illegal immigrants residing on the property who helped tend the marijuana garden.

“These grows are very labor-intensive,” Winters said. “It takes more than one person to handle a grow of 9,000 mature plants.”

LOS ANGELES COUNTY - Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich released figures from the Department of Public Social Services showing that illegal aliens’ children born in the United States collected more than $50 million in welfare benefits (CALWORKS + Food Stamps) for the month of January.

Approximately 23 percent of all CALWORKS and food stamp issuances in Los Angeles County are made to parents who reside in the United States illegally and collect benefits for their native-born children.

“When you add this to $350 million for public safety and nearly $500 million for healthcare, the total cost for illegal immigrants to County taxpayers far exceeds $1 billion a year - not including the millions of dollars for education,” Antonovich said.