Today I had lunch with John Fund of the Wall Street Journal and about 200 other supporters of Evergreen Freedom Foundation.

John has recently updated his book Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud threatens our Democracy with new material including Washington's 2004 accomplishment by Christine Gregoire. You can learn about the book and its theme at the Amazon link and the 2004 Washington Governor race was ably covered here by Stefan Sharkansky and others. So I won't go into their depths.

The $700 billion bail-out bill was not on the agenda, but was unavoidable, so a couple of notes:

- The tide turned against Secretary Paulson's bill when he went to the Republican caucus and referred to the Speaker and Majority Leader as "Nancy and Harry" but called their Republican near-counterparts "Boehner and Blunt." It was clear who are his friends.

- Fund didn't take a position on the bill that was defeated today or suggest how to rewrite it. But he suggested a "Plan B" that can be implemented by President Bush tomorrow without action by Nancy and Harry and their Congress.
(1) End "mark to market" which requires reflecting a reduced market value immediately even though the value might recover. This can cause insolvency even though recovery is possible. End it.
(2) Index the capital gains on stocks for inflation. Now you (and your mutual funds, etc.) pay tax on the "gain" that is eaten away by inflation. End that. It would increase everyone's gains and would certainly cause some people to sell stocks they were holding to avoid paying the excessive taxes, thus freeing up some "frozen" funds to provide desperately needed liquidity.

- ACORN, the "community organizer" group that has repeatedly been caught submitting voter registrations for nonexistent people and other voting fraud, has been big on pushing use of the Community Reorganization Act of 1977 which in the 1990s required banks to make risky loans, in effect making it illegal to do due diligence before making loans.

Stealing Elections and the 2008 election

- Barrack Obama was a very successful community organizer in a sub organization of ACORN. He rose to the top of ACORN and became, first, their national trainer, then their attorney. He doesn't brag about this (my emphasis).

- The 1993 Motor Voter Act required the risky practices of registering people by mail and while getting driver's licenses without appearing before an election official. It opened the door. Illinois Governor Edgar refused to implement parts of Motor Voter he found unconstitutional. He was sued by attorney Barrack Obama on behalf of ACORN. He doesn't talk about this accomplishment - he won in court.

- ACORN, the empire of vote fraud, cannot be audited or even tracked. It is not one organization, but 154 organizations in the same building: any attempt to trace funds will be futile. The $700 billion bail-out bill included 20%, that's $140 billion, for community organizations including ACORN. Correction: The 20% for ACORN was in the Friday version of the bill, but not the Monday version.

Cross-posted at Economic Freedom.