We can win

BALTIMORE — The community organizing group Acorn, battered politically from the right and suffering from mismanagement along with a severe loss of government and other funds, is on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, officials of the group said Friday.

Acorn is holding a teleconference this weekend to discuss plans for a bankruptcy filing, two officials of the group said. They asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

Over the last six months, at least 15 of the group’s 30 state chapters have disbanded and have no plans of re-forming, Acorn officials said. The California and New York chapters, two of the largest, have severed their ties to the national group and have independently reconstituted themselves with new names. Several other state groups are also re-forming outside the Acorn umbrella, and will not be affected if the national organization files for bankruptcy.

This week, the Maryland chapter announced that it would not reopen its offices, which were shuttered in September in the wake of a widely publicized series of video recordings made by two conservative activists, posing as a prostitute and a pimp, who secretly filmed Acorn workers providing them tax advice. In the videos, Acorn workers told one of the activists, James E. O’Keefe III, how to hide prostitution activities from the authorities and avoid taxes, raising no objections to his proposed criminal activities.

After the activists’ videos came to light and swiftly became fodder for 24-hour cable news coverage, private donations from foundations to Acorn all but evaporated and the federal government quickly distanced itself from the group.

Let this be a lesson to all conservatives. It is possible to fight back and win.

All it took was two college kids who wanted to be investigative journalists with a concealed video camera to start the dominoes falling.

That and an alternative media that would refuse to spike a story that would damage an Obama favored group of "community organizers".

Let us all take this lesson to heart and each of us pledge to do something to damage the left. Maybe we can't all conduct a hidden camera sting that brings down a corrupt interstate organization that specialized in voter fraud. But we can all conduct an in-depth study of an issue like global warming, energy policy, health care reform or islamofascism and then speak up when we otherwise would have been silent.

Speak up at work or at the corner tavern or the family gathering. Speak up with a decisive command of the facts and do not allow the "progressive" in the office, family or circle of friends dominate the conversation. Win the debate and even though you won't change the liberal's mind you just may change the minds of some of those who are listening in.

If you have the ability to do more then by all means do more. But under no circumstances do less. Polls by reputable firms consistently show that self identified conservatives make up the largest segment of the population (around 40%) and self identified liberals make up the smallest (around 20%).

We outnumber them 2-1 but because they have held a decades long monopoly on the mainstream media, both broadcast and print, along with the entertainment industry they have been able to create the false impression that left-liberal thinking is mainstream and conservatism is at best a fringe movement.

That monopoly is now broken. It lies shattered into as many pieces as the Berlin Wall (and its loss is mourned by leftists in the US as much as the Wall's demise is lamented by bitter-ender communists in Germany - and the rest of Europe - and American college campuses - and the American Democrat party). Thanks to men like Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, Mat Drudge and Andrew Breitbart there is a thriving alternate media out there which figures out on a daily basis a new and ever more interesting way to eat the old media's lunch.

Everything that can be done to make manifest the significant majority we enjoy among the people should be done. If the left loses the false confidence it gets from its illusion of dominance they will not recover for a generation.

So step up and do your part. We are in the majority and we have the capability to create momentum by our sheer numbers - if we are willing to stand up and be counted.