Last week it came out that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) had been approved by the Obama administration to help recruit millions of temporary workers the Census Bureau will need to count all Americans.

Well, yesterday ACORN — through one of its subsidiaries — decided to demonstrate its qualifications for the challenges: it showed that it could identify and locate a certain group of Americans, and disseminate their findings effectively.

ACORN did this by hosting a bus tour of some of AIG’s employees’ homes.

Gee, I can’t think of a single bad thing that might happen as the result of identifying the homes of people who are being denounced and demonized on a national stage

ACORN (well, ACORN’s puppet,  the Connecticut Working Families Party) says that it just wanted to show “what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy.” One wonders why the specific homes had to be indicated, and not just the neighborhoods.

Combine that with other aspects of the whole story — New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo demanding a list of the executives who received bonuses and the amounts, and Congress howling in protest over the bonus program they authorized — and the phrase “mob rule” doesn’t sound too hysterical.

For ACORN, this isn’t about justice; it’s about flexing its muscles. It’s about keeping people sufficiently outraged so that they can be manipulated. It’s about reminding the powers that be in Washington that ACORN is a force to be reckoned with.

In that context, the “See the lifestyles of the rich and greedy you’re paying for” tour is but a small part of the big picture. But it is very emblematic of the attitude and mentality behind ACORN, which is calling in the markers it’s been handing out over decades.

And, after the last election, quite a few of those marker-holders are holding positions of exceptional power.