Democrat brownshirts: ACORN and the new Black Panthers

MIKE'S FAVORITE THUGS?

The ongoing Senate circus in Albany is pure farce at its most absurd, but at one point this week, things turned downright ugly.
On Thursday, some 150 protestors -- many of them from the thuggish far-left group ACORN -- turned up outside the Senate chamber and actually assaulted members of the Republican faction.
The demonstrators nearly knocked to the floor Sen. James Alesi (of upstate Monroe County); they also spat in the face of his chief of staff, according to published reports.
Not only was this violence uncalled for, the ACORN crowd shouldn't even have been there in the first place: The Senate lobby is a restricted area, and public protests are explicitly prohibited.
Sen. George Winner (R-Elmira) accused Senate Secretary Angelo Aponte -- the Malcolm Smith ally who earlier had locked the entire Senate out of the chambers -- of having "clearly sanctioned" the riot.
Violence from ACORN hardly surprises: It has a history, dating to the '80s, of engaging in trespassing, illegal seizure of private property, physical harassment, intimidation and outright extortion.
Those tactics, along with its notorious, fraud-tainted "voter registration" efforts, have been bolstered not only with millions in union cash, but also with $53 million in direct federal aid since 1994.
All of which makes us wonder why Mayor Bloomberg felt the need to go to bat for the group and its anti-foreclosure efforts.
The mayor, along with some of his big-city counterparts, supports a "pilot" ACORN project that ostensibly "mediates" renegotiations of distressed mortgages between borrowers and lenders to avoid foreclosures.
His housing commissioner, Rafael Cestero, hailed ACORN as "a solid housing provider in the city and a partner to the city of New York."
It remains to be seen whether this particular program is above board -- though ACORN, with its record, deserves the benefit of no doubts whatsoever.
But we wonder.
Will Bloomberg -- with his unfortunate history of doing business with noxious figures like Lenora Fulani and, now, ACORN -- be singing a different tune if the shoving and spitting come to City Hall?