Unless you’ve been stuck in the Gobi Desert, you’ve read the headlines about the scandal at ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Earlier this month, ACORN staffers in four states were caught giving not-so-sage advice to two journalists, posing as a pimp and a prostitute, on how to defraud the government, cheat on taxes and wangle a mortgage for a home-based brothel.

ACORN was once the darling of Democrats for its support of every item on the left-wing wish list. Suddenly, its employees can hardly find a Democrat who will answer their phone calls. When the U.S. Senate voted on Sept. 14 to cut off federal housing dollars for ACORN, the tally was a lopsided 83-7.

ACORN’s foibles may seem largely irrelevant here in Minnesota, where the organization has so far been able to keep its nose relatively clean.

But ACORN does have a special place in its heart for at least one prominent Minnesota politician. Last year, it showered praise on Al Franken, endorsing his run for the U.S. Senate. Franken returned the esteem: “I’m thrilled and honored to receive this endorsement,” he gushed in a press release. He added that he was “more motivated than ever to work with ACORN.”

I’m not suggesting that Franken had any association with the folks behind ACORN’s recent scandal. Indeed, when the Senate voted to defund ACORN, he got religion and joined the pack.

It’s worth recalling, however, that ACORN is best-known for its massive voter-registration campaigns, which focus relentlessly on getting Democrats elected in targeted states. Here its record is appalling — and goes to the heart of our democratic electoral system.

In October 2008, ACORN announced triumphantly that it had registered about 1.3 million new voters in 18 battleground states, among them Minnesota. A few weeks later, however, the director of Project Vote — an ACORN affiliate — acknowledged to the New York Times that election officials had rejected about 400,000 of those, for reasons including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and (in the Times’ words) “fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors.”

Nothing new here. ACORN’s registration drives “routinely produce fraudulent registrations,” according to a staff report released in July 2009 by the ranking Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The report describes ACORN as “a criminal conspiracy” and details violations ranging from unpaid taxes to a million-dollar embezzlement and cover-up. “To date,” the report says, “nearly 70 ACORN employees have been convicted in 12 states for voter-registration fraud.”

The latest such scandal broke a few weeks ago, when authorities in Florida accused 11 ACORN workers of falsifying information on 888 voter-registration forms.

In May 2009, Nevada’s attorney general charged ACORN and two employees with 39 felonies. Authorities raided ACORN offices after complaints about numerous forms with false addresses and names — including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys. Forty-eight percent of forms turned in were “clearly fraudulent,” according to a Las Vegas election official. ACORN recruited felons living in transitional housing in Las Vegas to act as canvassers and promised illegal bonuses if they signed up more than 20 new voters a day.

ACORN’s practices can make fraud difficult to detect. For example, “at election offices around the country, ACORN workers are famous for waiting until registration deadline to dump thousands of new documents on overworked clerks — making it harder for them to fully vet the registration forms,” according to the New York Post.

As a result, fraud often only comes to light by chance. Fraud “has been discovered by cursory checks or by accident,” John Samples, an election expert at the Cato Institute, told the Post. “There’s a lot more out there to be discovered.”

Here in Minnesota, ACORN has boasted of playing a major role in the 2008 elections. It claims to have registered 43,000 new voters, which it describes as 75 percent of the state’s new registrations. Franken’s margin of victory in the Senate race was razor-thin: 312 votes out of about 3 million cast. And Minnesota’s laws on proof of voter eligibility are notoriously loose. Did ACORN folks pull some fast ones to help get their favorite son Franken elected — a win that handed Democrats the 60-vote, veto-proof majority that they needed to enact their liberal agenda?

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie assures us that Minnesota’s system of voter verification protects electoral integrity.

But here’s an uncomfortable fact: Ritchie himself was endorsed by the now-notorious ACORN and elected with its help.

High-school students: Did you stand last week with Homer on the walls of ancient Troy, watching awestruck as Achilles’ pride brought a vast army to the edge of disaster? Have you walked the mean streets of Victorian London with Oliver Twist? Before you graduate, will you and Mark Twain navigate the mighty Mississippi? Will you share Hester Prynne’s shame as she’s branded with a scarlet letter for her illicit love?

Today, too few teenagers embark on the literary quests for wisdom and adventure that timeless classics offer. Many American schools no longer teach these books. In the 1960s, the cry of “relevance” led some to trade Hamlet for the adolescent angst of Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye.” Later, obsessions with multiculturalism, racism and sexism made politically correct books like Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” de rigueur.

Now we’re taking another giant leap away from greatness toward mediocrity. The New York Times recently profiled an instructional approach called Reading Workshop — “part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools.” Reading Workshop can be implemented in various ways. Generally, however, it involves allowing students to choose the books they read — with few restrictions and minimal teacher guidance — instead of studying a serious work of literature as a class.

The movement has been around at least a decade. But it’s gaining steam in schools from New York City to Seattle, according to the Times.

The Times focused on Lorrie McNeill, a seventh- and eighth-grade teacher from suburban Atlanta who is taking the Reading Workshop approach to the max. She’s delegated all decisions about which books to read to her students, who discuss them individually with her or with classmates and write about them in journals.

McNeill no longer teaches books of substance, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.” Instead, her students are reading chick-lit books, the Captain Underpants comic-book-style novels, or pop literature such as “Chaka! Through the Fire,” a memoir by R&B star Chaka Khan. Though some students have chosen more challenging books, all are contemporary titles.

A fundamental assumption behind Reading Workshop is that what kids read doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they do read.

“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” enthuses McNeill. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”

Reading Workshop’s goal is to make students lifelong readers. But it’s hardly self-evident that reading about pop stars is a better use of kids’ — or anyone’s — time than playing video games or basketball.

In 2009, can we still argue persuasively that what young people read matters very much?

It’s clear, for starters, that kids who read books by masters of the literary craft are more likely to become skilled and thoughtful readers, writers and thinkers themselves.

But the reasons for reading good literature go well beyond this.

Young people — like human beings everywhere — face vital questions in life: What does it mean to be a true friend? What should I do when principle and self-interest conflict? How can I act in the face of fear?

In struggling to answer, however, they have limited resources to draw on. They see the world through the restrictive cultural prism of their own time and place. For many, teen actress Miley Cyrus or rapper Kanye West may be the ideal of greatness.

Good literature offers young people a way to transcend these limitations. Through classics that have spoken to readers for generations, they can come to see the myriad ways that people across the globe and through time have met the challenges of the human condition.

Am I convinced that the world is against me? Anne Frank’s story can show me how fortunate I am. Do I wonder what real courage looks like? I can learn by standing at the guillotine in the French Revolution with Dickens’ Sidney Carton in “A Tale of Two Cities.”

By reading good books, young people can watch the consequences of characters’ choices and actions unfold. As they gain insight into why others’ lives have succeeded or failed, they become equipped to live more wisely and well themselves.

Unless our children’s classroom reading aspires to such goals, we may find it hard to explain why the television and the game controller won’t do just as well.

The mainstream media seem dumbfounded that any thinking person could object to President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren on Sept. 8. The president simply told kids to work hard and stay in school, right?

The controversy is just more proof, the media seem to have concluded, that Obama’s critics are kooks and yahoos — you know, the sort of foaming-at-the-mouth folks who show up for tea parties or town hall meetings, or seem compelled to lie reflexively about Obama’s health care reform proposals.

Why are the mainstream media so clueless about the anger and disillusionment growing among independents and conservatives?

The controversy over Obama’s education speech provides a clue. Contrary to most news reports, objections didn’t center on the speech itself. The fracas erupted over the accompanying lesson plans, or “menu of classroom activities,” assembled by the White House and the federal Department of Education.

One particularly blatant proposed activity did get some press — an assignment instructing kids to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” But the White House dropped that after a public outcry, so what’s the big deal?

Here’s the problem: The letter was only one of many examples of Obama-worship in the lesson plans, whose tone and focus came straight from the “Dear Leader” playbook. The plans included few references to citizenship and responsibility. Instead, suggested classroom activities revolved around Obama himself — his thoughts, his desires, his admonitions, the lessons we can all learn from this great man.

For example, the lesson plan for prekindergarten through grade six suggests that teachers prepare young children for Obama’s speech not by discussing personal responsibility, but by studying Obama himself. Teachers can “build background knowledge about the President … and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama.”

And for the higher grade levels? Teachers can prepare them for the “historic” speech by decorating classrooms with the great leader’s sayings: “Teachers may post in large print around the classroom notable quotes excerpted from President Obama’s speeches on education.”

Cringe-inducing Obama-centrism of this kind pervades the lesson plans. Questions and assignments take for granted that students will be inspired and moved by Obama’s words, and will want to do what he asks of them.

Students in the lower grade levels, for example, are to ponder questions such as these: “What is the president trying to tell me?” “What do you think the president wants us to do?” “Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? … Parents? The American people?”

Questions for the higher grade levels include these: “Why does President Obama want to speak with us today?” “How will he inspire us?” “How will he challenge us?” The plans suggest that students reflect reverentially on the Obama quotes hung around the classroom, asking: “What are our interpretations of these excerpts?” “Based on these excerpts, what can we infer that the president believes is important in order to be educationally successful?”

This reverential tone is reinforced by the lesson plans’ odd fixation on noting the president’s exact words.

Young students, for example, may “record important parts of the speech where the president is asking them to do something,” writing down “key … phrases.” Older students may try to “capture direct quotations.” “Teachers could focus students on quotations that either propose a specific challenge to them or that inspire them in some meaningful way.” Examples: “What resonated with you from President Obama’s speech? … What are the three most important words in the speech?”

In 1991, the Washington Post went ballistic when President George H.W. Bush gave a speech to schoolchildren about working hard and staying in school. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post fumed. Democratic leaders expressed outrage and hauled administration officials before a hearing to probe the cost and legality of Bush’s action.

In 2009, however, the media cheered Obama’s school speech. Why? The chattering classes have fallen hard for Obama’s cult of personality. Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas may have spoken for many when he breathlessly said of Obama in an interview that “he’s the teacher” and “he’s sort of God.”

Today, average Americans are beginning to see something in Obama the mainstream media can’t. That’s a narcissism — a messianic quality — deeply at odds with the American spirit. Many members of the president’s own party seem to be sensing the same. They are backing away from Obama as the real content of the “hope” and “change” he promised becomes clear.

Since the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, we’ve witnessed his canonization as a kind of political saint. Media tributes have taken Kennedy’s selfless defense of the poor and downtrodden as a matter of course — and as iconic for our age.

The New York Times’ worshipful praise was typical. Kennedy, the Times assured its readers, “used his privileged life to give consistent, passionate voice to the underprivileged for nearly a half-century.”

Was Edward Moore Kennedy, in fact, “one of the greatest senators of our time,” as President Obama has declared?

No doubt, Kennedy’s efforts regarding the poor were unique and significant. He was, after all, one of only two U.S. senators still sitting in 2009 who were present for the construction of the entire infrastructure of the modern welfare state.

First elected in 1962, Kennedy was a lifelong advocate of the vision that animated Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty. These initiatives ushered in decades of welfare policy predicated on the belief that every social problem is best addressed by a massive, costly government program.

In fact, policies of this kind have been a disaster for the poor. Far from helping low-income people join the middle class, they created a permanent underclass, hobbled by crippling habits of dependence. By subsidizing self-destructive behavior and discouraging work and marriage, these policies contributed to soaring out-of-wedlock birth rates (5 percent in 1960, 39 percent today) and rampant crime and drug use, and helped to make fatherless families the norm in the inner city.

By 1996, President Bill Clinton was promising to “end welfare as we know it,” and many Democrats joined him. The resulting reforms emphasized work for recipients of aid to dependent children, and made government assistance temporary. Kennedy fought this new paradigm ferociously, and denounced it as “legislative child abuse.”

Clinton-era reform succeeded so well that, within a few years, welfare rolls had fallen by 60 percent. If Kennedy’s “consistent, passionate voice” had prevailed, many of America’s poor would be substantially worse off than they are today.

Kennedy’s death has spurred praise of another kind — that he was a uniquely bipartisan politician. Here again his actions tell a different story.

In 1987, Kennedy inaugurated the age of attack politics that bedevils our political world today. That year, he led the charge to defeat Robert Bork — President Reagan’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court and an eminent legal scholar.

Kennedy denounced Bork in poisonous language of jaw-dropping demagoguery: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”

Kennedy’s win-at-any-price ethic and his readiness to demonize opponents set the stage for the political divisiveness that, in 2009, seems increasingly insurmountable.

Finally, Kennedy was unique in our time in the depth of his failure of character. Recent media tributes have tended to gloss over his culpability in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick Island. But that incident demonstrated that when compassion and caring — his self-declared ideals — required a personal price rather than a rousing speech, he failed monumentally.

Kennedy — dogged for decades by rumors of boozing and womanizing — drove off from a party in 1969 with Kopechne, a 28-year-old campaign worker. He drove too fast, and his car plunged over a bridge into the channel. Kennedy managed to escape the submerged and overturned vehicle, leaving Kopechne trapped in eight feet of water.

Kennedy neither reported the accident to authorities nor called for emergency help for more than 10 hours. After others alerted authorities the next day, a police diver quickly recovered Kopechne’s body. Later, the diver testified that, had Kennedy run to the nearest residence and immediately summoned help, “there is a strong possibility that she would have been alive on removal from the submerged car.”

When brought face-to-face with human suffering, Kennedy used his wealthy and powerful family’s connections to protect his political reputation and career. A local Massachusetts judge let him off with a suspended sentence on a minor charge.

The liberal “lion of the Senate” reveled in his role as a champion of the oppressed. But lofty speeches and public poses are not the same as actions and their results. Sometimes, words and results stand at polar opposites. So it was with Edward Moore Kennedy.

Thousands of young Minnesotans will get their first taste of college life this week. Most can’t wait to forge new friendships — in particular, with members of the opposite sex.

Cassy Hough remembers the sense of excitement well. When she arrived as a freshman at Princeton University in 2003 from Stow, Mass., she was eager to build relationships. Her new friends, she hoped, might include a young man with whom she would eventually spend her life.

Many students share Hough’s hope of finding true love while on campus. Eighty-three percent of college women say marriage is an important life goal for them, and two-thirds would like to find a spouse at college, according to a survey done several years ago.

But at Princeton, Hough quickly discovered, the social scene revolved around casual sexual hookups, often fueled by alcohol. For people like her, who viewed marriage as the proper place for sexual intimacy, the university was an inhospitable place.

Hough was not the only student put off by the hookup scene. But “freshmen are desperate to fit in, to have friends, to seem normal,” she says. Over time, she adds, those who buy into the sexual free-for-all are likely to find that it brings not fun or fulfillment but a dreary morning-after of anxiety and emptiness.

Hough searched for a campus group of like-minded peers who could strengthen her resolve to live by her convictions and also offer an alternative social scene. But she found nothing. So in 2005, she started the Elizabeth Anscombe Society, named for a famous English philosopher.

The organization’s goal, as one supporter put it, is “to bring this closeted community out into the open” and to provide a voice and a support system for students who want to develop romantic relationships that are oriented toward marriage.

The Anscombe Society faces an uphill battle. At Princeton, as at most colleges, the gospel of sexual permissiveness is preached in the residence halls, the student health service — even the classroom.

“On campus, you’re constantly bombarded with reasons to dismiss and abandon” beliefs about marriage and family that run counter to the hookup orthodoxy, says Hough. “You hear nothing about the reasons that support them, and you’re given nothing to put in their place.”

At Princeton, for example, freshmen are required to attend skits on “date rape” that feature vulgarity and crude humor and seem to confirm that hooking up is the campus norm. They are also “strongly encouraged” to participate in “Safer Sex Jeopardy,” where they are quizzed on their knowledge of anal intercourse, sadomasochism, dental dams, sex toys and flavored condoms.

Ironically, the pressure to seek instant intimacy doesn’t bring men and women together but builds walls between them. “The sexes don’t trust each other, don’t respect each other,” says Hough. “Even girls who don’t want to hook up dress provocatively and dance suggestively. Then they’re surprised and bitter when guys come on as if they were asking for hookups.”

Why this confusion and despair over male-female relationships? Today’s students have inherited the fallout of both the 1960s sexual revolution and the epidemic of divorce that followed it.

“I see a whole generation of young people longing for authentic intimacy, for lifelong love, for marriage,” says Hough. “But many have lost hope that this is even possible.”

The Anscombe Society tries to fill this hole, in part, by bringing in speakers — physicians, social scientists, philosophers — who make the case for genuine romance, for marriage and for sexual integrity.

Princeton is not the only campus where young people hunger for this message. Today, groups like the Anscombe Society are springing up at institutions as diverse as Harvard and Arizona State University.

In 2007, Hough launched a new organization — the Love and Fidelity Network — that helps students across the country to start their own groups. The network (www.loveandfidelity.org) suggests activities, provides online resources and aids in designing action plans. Last year, its first national conference drew 130 students from 18 colleges. This year’s conference, Nov. 13-14 at Princeton, promises to be an even greater success.

One lesson will be this: “If you want lifelong love, true romance, you’ve got to practice how to love, how to deepen relationships,” says Hough. “Sexual hookups train you in bad habits that you will bring with you into future relationships.”

As anyone with a successful marriage knows, men and women can’t just say “I do” and expect to walk into a stable, happy-ever-after future. They need to cultivate an “I do” disposition — habits and attitudes like generosity, self-control and fidelity — that allow true love to flourish.