From U.S. News and World Report:

This latest round of problems for ACORN may be the best documented, but they are not the first nor, for that matter, are they the most serious.

A report issued last summer by the Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, according to Sunday's Washington Times, "presented evidence that ACORN had engaged in criminal misconduct."

Among the findings, the report said, ACORN:

Engaged in tax evasion, obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting a cover-up of nearly $1 million embezzled by Dale Rathke, brother of group founder Wade Rathke;

Committed investment fraud, depriving the public of the right to "honest services," and engaging in a racketeering enterprise affecting interstate commerce;

Conspired to defraud the United States by using taxpayer dollars for partisan political activities;

Submitted false filings to the Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Department of Labor; and,
Violated the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act.

Any one of these is a serious allegation. Taken together, they give ACORN most every appearance of being some sort of massive criminal enterprise worthy of a federal investigation of the sort made under the terms of the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act—or RICO.

In fact the group and its affiliates are currently the target of more than a dozen lawsuits related to voter fraud in the 2008 election alone."

This is why Democrats who have been supported by ACORN are now fleeing, cutting and running. They have voted to defund the group lest they be dragged down with them.

A special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate ACORN since the Obama Administration obviously has too many conflicts of interests to do a credible job.

Perhaps my favorite ACORN story, before this one, is when it sued the state of California to be exempt from its minimum wage laws. This, after organizing to push for a higher minimum wage. Hypocrisy doesn't come any clearer than that.

As with most criminal organizations it won't be its most significant crimes that take it down. (Remember Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion.) But the videos of ACORN workers across the country giving two undercover activist filmmakers advice on how to a child prostitution ring without paying taxes will by the death of ACORN.

And if the president, a past ACORN community organizer and top legal counsel, doesn't order a special prosecutor to dig deeper into its activities, the scandal could drag him down too.

Left-wing kooks will continue to defend ACORN until their dying breath, sucked in as they are by any group that claims to be on the side of poor people. But ACORN doesn't help the poor, it exploits and corrupts them for its own self-perpetuating gain.