Sorry, this tale of family life at a Charlotte extended stay hotel reads like a brief for a “living-wage” campaign for the city — a hallmark of the radical activist group ACORN, which has ramped up its presence in Charlotte since the 2004 election.

ACORN tries to pressure cities into adopting local minimum wage rates in excess of the $5.15 mandated by federal law.

In fact, ACORN is very skilled at getting its agenda across and adopted, as this 2003 profile explains:

As part of its readiness to work within the system, ACORN makes use of the most establishment of mainstream private institutions as allies—everything from leftist charitable foundations, including the Abell and Tides Foundations, which shower it with grants, to mainstream churches and synagogues. For example, during a successful campaign in Los Angeles for its trademark wage legislation, ACORN helped organize Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), a coalition of city congregations whose spiritual leaders tended to see “social justice” as religion’s central message. CLUE promoted the measure among congregants, sent religious delegations to the city council to push for the law, and cast opponents as Egyptians holding the chosen people in bondage. ACORN’s detailed and effective manual for organizers points out that mobilizing the religious community imparts the odor of sanctity to a left-wing social agenda.

“Religious involvement highlighted the moral and theological reasons for a Living Wage,” the manual observes. Oppose the agenda, and you seem like part of an unholy alliance.

There’s nothing mainstream about that agenda, of course. ACORN’s specific policy prescriptions offer a job-killing recipe for urban blight and decline. Take, above all, ACORN’s signature “living-wage” legislation, which fully 80 cities have now adopted. This legislation requires that companies doing business with the city must pay their employees a minimum wage that is higher than the national minimum—often as much as one-third higher.

The earlier versions of this law embraced only a handful of workers, while the later have included larger and larger numbers, ending with Santa Fe’s ordinance, passed just weeks ago, that covers all workers within the city and will hike the pay of a quarter of the private workforce. Clearly, unlike the old New Left, ACORN is patient, willing to achieve its goals by a thousand modest increments.

Read the whole thing here. Who knows maybe someone at the local Knight Ridder outlet will too and take their paper back.