So both the Senate and the House voted on legislation yesteday or rather amendments to legislation that would block ACORN from receiving Federal funding because a couple of ACORN employees got caught in a sting giving advice to a faux pimp on how to set up a hooker ring tax free.

 I've got little symphathy for ACORN as to me they've always come across as a shady organization working in the subterreanean grey zone where they claim to be community organizers but seem more as a front to make some money. Probably started out as a good idea which went bad. 

 I've got less sympathy for a Congress that'll waste time fighting over the little argument of the day or the latest 24-hour news cycle meaningless issue over the bigger picture stuff, like health care reform or something like, I don't know, a war. 

And there is the thing of perception. ACORN, in the last fifteen years or so, has received $54 million dollar in Federal funds, mostly to help with the census and low income housing. This somehow makes them the bogeyman of the right. However, another Federal contractor, Blackwater Worldwide, the firm that provided security for a variety of purposes in Iraq received as of 2007, $1B in Federal no bid contracts. Even after it was accused of killing 17 Iraqi citizens it remained a no bid contract reciepient of the Bush administration. 

Now Blackwater is known as Xe, their founder is under investigation for murdering American citizens who were working with Federal invesigators looking into charges that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. 

Despite all this Xe received an extension on an aeronautics contract in Iraq for $20M, is contracted to train Afghan soldiers, continues to have a presence in Iraq, provides training (domestically) to the US military and law enforcement and is actively bidding on other government contracts.

Why is ACORN blacklisted for having low level employees doing something stupid and illegal but Blackwater remains on the government roles when their top executives were involved in murder? As Woodward and Bernstein were once told, follow the money, right? 

And of course there is our friends over at AIG, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers and so on. Through their corporate  malfeasance, greed and down right thievery they pushed this nation to the brink of economic ruin. I'm not talking about the collapse of Wall Street here, we're talking the end of capitalism. Their actions forced the tax payers of this country to shell out over 1.4 trillion dollars to balance the ship, they drove millions of Americans into unemployment, ate up trillions in retirement and pensions savings and have set this economy back so that it will be a decade before we really recover.

How were they handled. They were given two separate sweetheart bailout packages from two separate administrations.  Part of which they wanted to use to pay out bonuses to their top executives. Where's the Congressional outrage? Has one executive from any failed insurance or banking institution done a perp walk for their actions? Not that I know of. Hell, most of them weren't even fired. 

Should ACORN suffer for the actions of their low level employees? Sure, but the punishment should fit the crime, this wasn't a top down effort to tell pimps how to set up businesses, it was a gotcha type sting of some probably untrained and unintelligent employees set up by the GOP to begin with. Meanwhile, the crimes of both the Wall Street investment firms and Blackwater were top down approved, the culture of those firms was to bilk the government and American people for everything they could, breaking whatever laws they had to to do it. 

 So tell me, of the three cases outlined above, where should the quick and decivsive action of the legislative branch come down upon?