When you’re America’s most liberal senator locked in a tight race with a conservative challenger, it’s always a good thing when a damning YouTube that shows you praising organized crime disappears.

Hard-left Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) appears in a 2008 video praising the gangster group known by the acronym ACORN. In the video dated May 12, 2008, called “ACORN Grassroots Democracy Campaign,” Brown praises the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to the heavens:

I’ve met with ACORN lots of times in Ohio. They’re a terrific grassroots organization that is working to connect politics with working families and low-income people and there’s no higher calling than that as more low-income people are going to vote this year and help to change the direction of our country. […]

Because ACORN is so articulate and so outspoken in advocating for low income people they bring an awful of people into politics to the voting booths who wouldn’t come otherwise.

I had accessed the video on July 22, 2010 while I was working on the manuscript for my exposé of ACORN, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Ripping Off and Terrorizing American Taxpayers, but now the 9-minute clip is locked. The video may only be viewed with the permission of the YouTube account holder. Visit the web address for the video and this message appears: “This video is private. Sorry about that.”  I saved the video and uploaded it here.

Brown’s connection to ACORN has a special significance for Ohioans.

That’s because ACORN settled a racketeering lawsuit in Ohio out of court and agreed to leave the state. In the settlement with the Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, ACORN agreed to “cease all Ohio activity” and surrender its state business licenses.

Brown’s Republican opponent is Josh Mandel. Real Clear Politics currently rates the race a “Toss Up.”

Brown, who frequently compares his political antagonists to Adolph Hitler, was ranked most liberal U.S. senator by National Journal in 2009 and 2010 (after Barack Obama left the Senate). He had been a longtime champion of the innately corrupt ACORN, once America’s largest Saul Alinsky-inspired leftist group.

But when the undercover videos shot by James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles surfaced at Breitbart.com in 2009, Brown ran away from ACORN as fast as he could. Video after video graphically confirmed ACORN’s willingness to facilitate child prostitution, sex trafficking, mortgage fraud, tax evasion, and other crimes.

When legislation came before the Senate to ban all federal funding of the ACORN empire of activism consisting of 370-plus affiliated organizations, Brown relented to public pressure and supported the ban. Last year I revealed in Subversion Inc. that at least $79 million in taxpayer-funded federal grants had been funneled to ACORN and affiliates since 1994.

Brown voted in favor of blocking taxpayer funding of ACORN, breaking with other so-called progressives such as Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) (The recorded vote number 275 on S.Amdt. 2355 to H.R. 3288 took place on Sept. 14, 2009.)

Other politicians, including Sen. Robert P. Casey (D-Penn.), Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-Md.), and Congressman Brad Miller (D-N.C.), also praise ACORN in the video. Political strategist and CNN commentator Paul Begala appears in the video, speaking at length. Congressmen Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) make silent cameo appearances in the video.

Although ACORN Inc., the shell corporation that controlled the entire ACORN network, filed for bankruptcy on Election Day 2010, ACORN lives on in the form of more than two dozen separate organizations that share the same radical, anti-American objectives.

Its fraud-prone get-out-the-vote unit, Project Vote, remains in business. President Obama worked for Project Vote in Chicago in 1992, and he subsequently lectured and trained ACORN operatives.

At least 54 individuals employed by or associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud, sometimes called electoral fraud or election fraud, is a blanket term used by lawyers that encompasses a host of election-related improprieties including fraudulent voting, double-voting, voter registration fraud, perjury, forgery, counterfeiting, impersonation, intimidation, and identity fraud.

ACORN itself was convicted of a kind of voter fraud last year in Nevada. ACORN/Project Vote senior official Amy Adele Busefink, was also convicted in the massive conspiracy.

Despite this, Busefink remains employed at Project Vote, which is involved in a get-out-the-vote drive for the approaching election. Busefink had appealed her conviction, arguing that the Nevada law forbidding cash bonuses for voter registration was unconstitutional.

On October 4 of this year, the Supreme Court of Nevada rejected her appeal, upholding both her conviction and the electoral integrity law she challenged.

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