In an article published at Florida Political Press, First Coast Tea Party organizer Billie Tucker writes that the “Rally to the Right” will include a “Tea Are the World” concert, and an appearance by would-be Republican presidential nominee Rick Santorum. Former Senate Candidate Christine O’Donnell and ACORN whistleblower Anita Moncrief will also speak at the event.

From Tucker’s article:

This month we place our stake in the ground and declare the next 12 months for the Voices of the People. We will be heard and we will choose liberty over tyranny.

Beginning this Sunday, we will start our march towards November 2012 and taking our country back from the hands of the progressives.

This is it. The time is now. All of us – including those who are timid and fearful of standing up – must do so.

The left is planning to keep us in bondage with increasing debt, excessive spending and tougher regulations on individuals and companies.

No one is coming to rescue America. Only Americans can do that.

We do that through choosing our leaders who will lead with honesty, integrity, courage, wisdom and morality.

The event will take place at 2 p.m. Sunday, on the grounds of the Zamar Conference Center in Jacksonville.

“Andrew Breitbart has undeniably proven the importance online activism and investigative journalism plays in influencing narratives in the media,” said Americans for Prosperity’s Slade O’Brien in a press release. “Andrew’s exposé of Congressman Weiner’s shameful actions and the resulting special elections in New York’s 9th Congressional District demonstrates the power of new media and the momentum it continues to gain.”

Americans for Prosperity is a tea party-affiliated group that was founded by David Koch, one of two billionaire brothers who have given more than $100 million to “right-wing causes,” according to The New Yorker.

Breitbart recently made headlines with controversial comments made during a tea party meeting in Boston, in which he reflected on the possibility of a coming “civil war” between conservatives and liberals. “[Liberals] can only win a rhetorical and a propaganda war,” he said. “They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns.” Breitbart said “a part of” him wants liberals to initiate an armed conflict.

Moncrief, a former ACORN employee, is well-known for testifying against the community organizer group in court.

The two will be joined by TV host and commentator Stephen Kruiser, Florida blogger Jordan Raynor, The Franklin Center’s Erik Telford and Kelly Carson, Townhall.com’s Guy Benson and Alice Linahan of Voices Empower.

In addition to Breitbart, featured speakers also include controversial former Federal Election Commissioner Hans A. von Spakovsky, former Department of Justice attorney Christian Adams, self-described “ACORN whistleblower” Anita Moncrief and conservative author/columnist John Fund.

Breitbart has founded several media websites and is a prominent conservative author and commentator for the Washington Times and on television. Spakovsky is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The national summit will take place March 25-26; registration for the entire event is $150. Registration is required for members of the media.

The recent statewide event drew about 80 participants and also featured appearances by Adams and Moncrief. Now heading the Election Law Center, Adams resigned from the DOJ over alleged voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party, accusing the DOJ of racial bias. Moncrief is a spokesperson for conservative group American Majority, publisher of right-wing website EmergingCorruption.com and leader of the new Crispus Attucks Tea Party in Houston, the first minority tea party group in Texas.

During the statewide summit, Moncrief said she planned to connect King Street Patriots leaders with national conservative players in Washington, D.C., which is gearing up for the national Conservative Political Action Conference Feb. 10-12, where Breitbart is also slated to be a featured speaker. Moncrief also said she planned to initiate a national True the Vote project based in D.C.

“If they’ve come up with a formula, more power to them. Why should I start from scratch when I can build off and work with them? There is strength in numbers,” said California tea partier Rachel Bishar, saying a KSP/TTV initiative is needed in her “two-to-one liberal county” of Santa Barbara.

Both an educational and mobilization effort, the weekend summit in Houston served as a training ground for interested activists sharing in the goal to provide so-called “free and fair elections.”

Attendees convinced that corruption has seeped into the electoral process applauded the message of speakers, including “ACORN whistleblower” Anita MonCrief and former Department of Justice elections attorney J. Christian Adams, who offered their conservative network contacts, legal expertise and various services to the tea partiers discontent with what they see as a defunct voting system.

While alleging voter fraud during the 2009 and 2010 elections in Harris County, KSP/TTV has found itself embroiled in its own controversies, including a personal defamation suit and a DOJ investigation into reported voter intimidation. Poll watchers — purportedly trained by KSP/TTV — were accused of “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of early voters waiting to cast ballots in predominately Latino and African American populated areas, Talking Points Memo and the Houston Press reported in October.

Additionally, the Texas Democratic Party (TDP) is pursuing a lawsuit, and campaign finance watchdog Texans for Public Justice has filed an ethics complaint, against KSP/TTV for allegedly violating the state’s prohibition on corporate campaign contributions, as has been previously reported by the Texas Independent.

Despite the serious allegations, KSP/TTV has ramped up its mission, building a coalition of conservative activists tasked with detecting illicit voting conduct.

“There was a minority of precinct areas that we saw where the rules were not being followed; in fact they were being flagrantly disregarded,” said KSP/TTV president Catherine Engelbrecht. “And later, through our research, we discovered some disturbing patterns.”

In Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s district, KSP/TTV claims to have found 19,596 registered voters who shared their home address with six other people — outnumbering findings in other congressional districts, including those of Republicans Michael McCaul (1,973), Pete Olson (2,111) and Ted Poe (2,899), as well as Democrat Al Green (8,981) — as of May 2010. KSP/TTV activists vetted 3,800 of the nearly 20,000 voters over the course of five months. They claim to have uncovered duplicate registrations, nonexistent addresses, addresses corresponding to vacant lots and 595 registrations that did not match Texas driver license addresses. The group turned over 496 questionable voters to Harris County tax assessor collector Leo Vasquez; 465 voters were suspended as result.

To streamline the process, KSP/TTV compiled an online multi-county database to supplant Excel files or hand-written spreadsheets, in order to keep track of every citizen’s voter registration information while providing a mechanism to add, delete and edit “suspect registrations” as they are discovered, such as registered felons, the deceased or those who list businesses as addresses. In the next 15-30 days, KSP/TTV plans to roll out an expanded database, which currently includes the 1.9 million registered voters in Harris County, to cover the entire state. The password-protected data trove, filtered by four tiers of security, will only be accessible to vetted tea party activists, who are required to sign nondisclosure agreements.

“They [the secretary of state] are not doing their job. It takes someone to push them to do their job – and that’s where we all come in,” said Mark Antill, King Street Patriots executive director. “In a sense we are doing what our county should be doing.”

Antill instructed activists on how to investigate dubious voter addresses and challenge registrations, from taking hundreds of photos to utilizing Google satellite images.

“The idea is to get to a place where every county in Texas can just go here [in the database] and look up their neighbor,” he said.

Audience members were motivated to become ‘citizen journalists,’ mobilize using social media and optimize the negative effects of bad publicity on the Internet (citing reporting on KSP/TTV done by the Texas Independent). As for KSP/TTV’s disputed poll watching practices, a one-hour crash course was presented to attendees, including poll watcher exams, guides and a short training video.

KSP/TTV leaders say their poll monitoring efforts during the last election yielded some 700 incident reports, filed largely against presiding and alternate judges and clerks for assisting voters with ballots and suggesting candidates or party choices. Engelbrecht said the charges are currently being reviewed by the secretary of state, county attorney and county tax assessor-collector.

“Anti-ACORN”

Offering legal advice to the group was the Election Law Center’s Adams and Liberty Institute president Kelly Shackelford, who is also an attorney for KSP/TTV.

“Keep fighting. Don’t give up. They are going to attack and conjure up a racial issue. You will win this because middle America is on your side,” said Adams, who accused the DOJ of racial bias during a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. Adams warned the activists of “ideological driven, well-funded groups that seek to perpetuate voter fraud,” while Shackelford took the opportunity to dismiss TDP’s ongoing lawsuit as a “baseless attempt at intimidation.”

Keynote speaker MonCrief — spokesperson for conservative nonprofit American Majority — retold her story working for and exposing bad practices by low-income voter registration group ACORN. The self-identified “ex-liberal” described her time at the now-defunct ACORN as spent among “wealthy liberals with trust funds” who were able to subsist on modest $25,000 salaries while using minorities as shields to cover up nefarious activities, such as duplicate voter registrations, Internal Revenue Service violations, money laundering and Federal Elections Commission violations. It was not about the “movement,” helping the poor or fighting injustice, but about money and power, MonCrief said.

She is convinced Pres. Barack Obama was aware of ACORN’s questionable actions during his campaign, and that he could not have achieved victory without the organization. To MonCrief, KSP/TTV efforts symbolize an opportunity to reverse the corruption she was exposed to and implicated in while on the job.

MonCrief is leader of the brand-new Crispus Attucks Tea Party, the first minority tea party group in Texas. Its stated mission is to, “identify and vet viable conservative candidates,” empower black businessmen, promote personal responsibility and capitalism while helping blacks “fully assimilate into American society.”

“I believe the moral values of African Americans – fiscal responsibility, limited government and personal responsibility– are more in line with conservative and tea party values than any other political group,” MonCrief said in an interview shortly after her speech.

The inaugural meeting of Crispus Attucks is scheduled to take place today in Houston. The area represented by the group is a former ACORN-targeted neighborhood and in Rep. Jackson Lee’s district.

“What has she [Lee] done for the district? She is more concerned about getting reelected. We have invited her and would love to talk to her about her office,” said MonCrief, a D.C.-area resident who intends to move to Houston, according to Houston Press. “But right now, we are here to take it back. The people need a voice.”

On board with KSP/TTV efforts since last year, MonCrief plans to connect the Houston tea partiers with major Conservative Political Action Conference players in February, one month shy of the group’s national conference, to form a more extensive network of conservatives. She aims to launch a D.C.-based national KSP/TTV initiative soon.

“National expansion?”

Of the roughly 80 summit attendees, most made the drive to Houston from Texas cities like Dallas and El Paso, representing their local tea party organizations, while a handful journeyed from outside the state. A precursor to the KSP/TTV nationwide summit in March, the recent event acted as a springboard to help similar efforts launch in California, Florida, North Carolina and New Jersey.

Many said the task of implementing voter monitoring programs is less daunting now that KSP has laid the groundwork.

Soon-to-be retired military officer Jay DeLancy said his time off will be spent organizing poll watching and voter integrity efforts. A visitor from Raleigh, N.C., DeLancy said voter registration issues in neighboring Chatham County prompted his interest. “There are problems in our state,” he said. “I came here to get the tools, validate the process and take the information back to my hometown.”

Texas tea party leaders were excited about the prospect of sinking their teeth into KSP/TTV’s extensive voter database. Bill Moore of Organizing for Liberty in Fort Bend County said he didn’t suspect much fraud in his county, but will attempt to check on it anyway.

“This database is incredible and will really help us get the job done,” Moore said.

After two days of rallying at the state Capitol at the start of the legislative session, KSP/TTV activists plan to return to lobby lawmakers on issues ranging from voter photo ID to designating English as not only the official language of Texas, but the only language used on ballots, a measure that received thunderous applause from the audience. Activists were also encouraged to promote stringent rules applying to deputy registrars, the prohibition of same-day voter registration, requiring election officers to complete tests, allowing recording devices inside polling places and requiring the confidentiality of poll watcher identities.

Summit speakers tried to frame their intentions in a nonpartisan tone, touting mantras like “it was never about party, it was always principle,” while at the same time complaining that for far too long conservative eyes were missing from poll monitoring.

“We make no apologies for being conservative, and we will debate to the death the conservative mindset is the intended trajectory for this country,” Engelbrecht said.

“That being said, our country needs two parties. We need to have healthy, open, honest debate but what we are seeing – not too get too political – we all know this, but the fringe elements that are taking control of this conversation are the ones that we stand against in an effort like True the Vote.”

“In Massachusetts, the Scott Brown election, there was video of someone passing out blank absentee ballots on election day to people who had already voted.”

This isn’t true. On election day, one of the more than 150 conservative activists who traveled to Massachusetts to document “fraud” filmed Lawrence, Mass., community activist Isabelle Melendez showing a cameraman a facsimile of an absentee ballot as she explained how she educated her radio show listeners on how to fill them out. Facsimile ballots are about as controversial on election day as “I voted” stickers — I saw similar ballot samples posted near the entrances to polling places. ElectionJournal.com never updated its story on the video — it’s been a “developing” situation for a month.

And there you go, a fact-free story that was debunked on election day survives as a “voter fraud” horror story. Behold, the power of shaky video.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) reaches into his bucket of acorns at Tuesday's ACORN forum. (twitpic: darrellissa)

As legislators streamed into the room around him, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, peered over his glasses at the roughly 60 people who’d come to this special hearing on ACORN.

“I’m glad to see this turnout so early in the day,” said Smith. (The hearing began at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, but there was nothing happening in the House.) “Today’s hearing is an opportunity for Republicans to move forward on this issue of importance to the American people.”

With most of Washington’s attention focused on the health care debate happening a flew blocks away in the Senate, or President Obama’s upcoming speech on troop escalation in Afghanistan, Smith and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the sponsors of the hearing, were able to attractive an impressive amount of media. Six cameras were staged around the room, and national reporters filled out the seats behind the witness stand alongside members of ACORN-investigating conservative organizations like the Capital Research Center and Big Government. Officially titled a “Joint Forum on ACORN,” the hearing gave Republicans a chance to re-air allegations against the controversial activist group, which lost its long-standing federal funding in two lopsided September votes.

[GOP1]The eight Republican members of Congress who showed up for the hearing didn’t disappoint. With one exception, they labeled ACORN a “criminal enterprise” with close and current ties to the highest levels of the Obama administration and the labor movement.

“President Obama previously served as ACORN’s lawyer, participated in ACORN training sessions in Chicago, and presided on the board of two organizations that funded ACORN’s Chicago chapter,” said Smith. An old picture of Obama in an ACORN office was posted near the hearing stand to bolster his point. “The president’s ties with ACORN taint any conclusions the Department of Justice may reach with regard to whether or not to investigate ACORN employees. That’s why I’ve requested that the attorney general appoint a special prosecutor to investigate ACORN.”

To bolster their case, Republicans produced 81 pages of documents about ACORN’s voter registration activities in 2004 and 2006  — a supplement to Issa’s 99-page July 2009 report, “Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?”

The 81 new pages, helpfully highlighted by staffers, put ACORN staffers on the record planning voter registration drives and campaigns for “progressive” candidates. They also touched on the organization’s social work — “within the next year Maryland ACORN will conduct 500 new lead tests for low and moderate-income renters and homeowners” — but members and witnesses argued that the organization’s political activity, clearly benefiting Democrats and President Obama, was at least reason to strip it of tax-exempt status.

“The current admin is becoming, in reality, the war room for ACORN’s political machine,” said Issa. “The poor will be better served when ACORN is no longer a go-to place for services.”

Issa kept his case simple: ACORN was intervening in, and tampering with, elections, using “money taken from poor people.” And he spent much of his time tossing friendly questions to Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN employee who has turned into a whistleblower against everything the group did while she worked there. Moncrief said that she joined the group to help the poor; when she decided that they were bilking people who asked for help, and that they were spending too much time assisting Democrats, she bolted.

“All of us, maybe with one exception, knew Albert Wynn,” said Issa, referring to  unpredictable former congressman from Maryland’s African-American suburbs of Washington, D.C. “He was well-liked, a good man.”

In a short round of questions, Moncrief charged ACORN with conspiring to aid progressive candidate Donna Edwards — who’s currently serving in Congress, having defeated Wynn. “Albert Wynn was pictured next to George Bush,” said Moncrief, describing a PowerPoint presentation she saw. “They tried to paint him in a light that he was friendly with George Bush. They wanted to support Donna Edwards, who happens to sit on the board of one of the organizations that supplied money for one of their campaigns.”

Issa shook his head. “Here, today, the distortion even in the Democratic primary, of ‘you’re not the right kind of Democrat,’ speaks legions about why this should be investigated by both parties,” said Issa. “Obviously we’d like the attorney general in Maryland to do something about that.”

Issa’s congressional colleague was not the only Democrat to take fire from the hearings. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who brought a plastic bucket of acorns with him as an illustration, asked witness Hans Von Spakovsky, a Bush Department of Justice veteran who now works at the Heritage Foundation, about the role new White House Counsel Bob Bauer might play in “scrubbing the trail between the president and ACORN.”

“He’s a nice guy,” said Von Spakovsky, “but he’s a fierce opponent. He was general counsel of the DNC. He’s willing to just about anything to win.”

King and Von Spakovsky agreed that Bauer, in writing a 2008 memo pre-emptively attacking the McCain-Palin campaign for hyping the bogus voter registration forms filled out in swing states — forms that did not result in illegal votes, but took considerable time to find illegitimate — had proven himself willing to go to bat for ACORN. King, going further, suggested that the October resignation of former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, Bauer’s wife, was tied to local ACORN investigations. “It wasn’t planned,” said King, apparently not believing Dunn’s long-announced plans to hold the job for a few months and then leave. Von Spakovsky ignored that argument, but backed up the rest of King’s case.

“Bauer’s argument was that if you talk about voter fraud, you’re intimidating voters,” said Von Spakovsky. “I guess I should be looking in the mail for a subpoena because I write about voter fraud quite a bit.”

In another, tone-setting exchange, King explained that he always kept a Constitution and a real acorn, from the Capitol grounds, in his pockets. The purpose, he said, was to remind him of the threat ACORN posed to the Constitution.

“My opinions are my own,” said Von Spakovsky, “and not representative of the Heritage Foundation — although I must say, I think Congressman King was holding a Heritage copy of the Constitution.” King nodded and smiled at the witness.

The rest of the hearing was about that friendly. The other Republicans who grilled their witnesses were largely concerned with horror stories from their states and confirmation of their worst fears about ACORN.

“Every two years we talk about voter fraud, and then the media goes away,” said Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.). “I think it’s time folks go to jail for voter fraud in this country, and then they lose the right to vote. That’s what happens to convicted felons in this country.”

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who was introduced by Issa as the former chairman the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee who’d signed the most subpoenas in history in order to investigate allegations of Democratic campaign finance abuse–”1,209! I got writer’s cramp!”–framed the ACORN issue as a battle for basic American freedoms. “Our forefathers fought for, I don’t know, what, eight years to defeat the British because they didn’t want taxation without representation,” said Burton. “And now we’re watching all these things being taken away, just frittered away, because we won’t enforce the law? It’s just criminal.”

The one dissonant note came from Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.), who defeated the indicted (and now convicted) former Congressman William Jefferson last year to grab the most-Democratic seat currently held by a Republican. Cao, who represents New Orleans, explained that he was in the room to “gather information,” not to indict ACORN. “I’ve seen them work in Louisiana,” said Cao. “This organization has done some good things in order to address the issues of minorities.” Less than halfway through the two-hour meeting, though, Cao left, without asking questions of the witnesses.

Little was revealed about ACORN that has not been reported; King even referred witnesses to a Fox News documentary on the group for part of his evidence. And before closing the hearing, Issa admitted that “ACORN’s amount of money that they’ve received from the government is relatively small.” The point, he said, was to rattle Democrats into holding a real investigation.

“I regret that this forum is necessary,” said Issa. “The American people deserve official hearing into ACORN. This hearing is necessarily partisan, but I would like to have this be nonpartisan.”

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) made a simpler case for more hearings.

“From one acorn,” said Gohmert, “many nuts can grow.”

The court’s ruling Thursday afternoon was a big victory for the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now and a big loss for its GOP critics. Republicans wanted ACORN to turn over copies of all the voter-registration forms it had submitted in Pennsylvania and for the state’s elections officials to check the IDs of all new voters. The judge ruled that the Republican Party had “failed to persuade the court that they are likely to prevail on the merits” — despite the testimony of Anita Moncrief, the former ACORN employee.

Moncrief, by the way, was fired by ACORN for using the organization’s credit card to amass $3,000 in personal expenses. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that since January, she has had two jobs and is now unemployed. She also testified that she never actually worked on voter registration with ACORN in Pennsylvania.

A similar lawsuit against the community organizing group is pending in Ohio. That one, brought by the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a conservative/libertarian group, seeks the dissolution of ACORN.