O'Keefe Justice!

By Jeff Simpson

James O Keefe had always played Gilligan to Andrew Breitbardt's Skipper. While they had been popular in the far right circles, they really bust onto the scene when they did their hidden camera exclusive on community organizing group ACORN!  

A quick rundown, Mack Daddy  James O' Keefe(JOK) and his strumpet girlfriend Hannah Giles paraded into local ACORN offices and "pretended" to be a pimp/prostitute.   A combination of poor judgement of a couple staffers, ridiculous claims and heavily edited video's it made it appear as though they were willing to help with OKeefe with human trafficing, child prostitution and tax evasion.  JOK & his prop even went on Fox News racistly dressing the part. 

After all it must be a corrupt organization to help someone out dressed like this right?  The problem is he only dressed like that to go on Fox News, never in the ACORN offices.   Despite the slander and lies of Fox News and Andrew Breitbardt, ACORN was cleared of ALL charges!  This story stunk so bad even crazy John Stossel passed on it! 

Thanks to our court system and Open records, we now know a few things.  

1.  It turns out O Keefe and Giles were actually prostitutes.  Breitbart and his business partner paid them $120,000 for this disgusting public display!

The pair admitted under oath to signing contracts with (the now recently deceased) Andrew Breitbart and his business partner, attorney Larry Solov, for the sum total of $120,000.

 2.  They so heavily edited the video of ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera that he was just awarded $100,000 in damages! 

According to the final 5-page agreement, signed by O’Keefe and his legal counsel Mike Madigan this past Tuesday, the boy detective now publicly “regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family.” O’Keefe and his counsel have also consented to fork over the $100,000 within 30 business days of the settlement agreement’s being signed.

Breitbart protege O Keefe, lost the first of his many lawsuits for damaging and ruining people's lives with his own brand of "citizen journalism".  

I look forward to many more of these stories as time goes on!



 

Republican Fantasyland!

Nuff Said:

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Intellectually Dishonest or Just Plain Dumb?

Scott Walker and his campaign team are having a bad time of it apparently, judging from some of their stunts.

The most recent flailing from the Walker campaign was when he tried to seize advantage of this blog posting on JSOnline, in which it is reported that Tom Barrett expressed support for a bill working its way through the state legislature that would allow people to be registered to vote when they get their driver's license.

For the record, I've already said that I thought this idea was a waste of time, energy and money. But I must have some gift of foresight, since I wrote this:

I can just see the Republicans standing in front of the DMV with the papers waving in their hands saying how this proves their is voter fraud and that ACORN* is taking over the world.

*Yes, I know that ACORN is defunct, but there are some on the right already claiming this is a conspiracy to lull people.

Sure as the sun comes up in the morning, Scott Walker comes along and proves me correct when he tweeted this:

This was faithfully retweeted by his campaign staff, including his Director of Communication who was retweeting my favorite troll.

Now, would someone please let Walker know that ACORN is no more? He's getting so desperate that I am almost embarrassed for him.

Get A License, Get Registered To Vote

This should make more than a few vote-suppressing right wingers go nuts:

Wisconsin residents could soon register to vote in a unique way.

A bill being presented to the state legislature would automatically register you to vote when you receive your drivers license or register your vehicle.

Many states offer that option, but Wisconsin would be the first to
Make it automatic, unless a voter opted out.

But the Wausau City Clerk says it could cause issues and add expenses when it comes to the voter lists, because not everyone who has a license or registers a car intends to vote.

"Those lists are what I use a certain percentage is what I use to order ballets for, so if you swell my list to a larger population that never intend to vote its going to cost not only myself but every municipality in the state more in ordering supplies for elections," said Kelly Michaels, Wausau City Clerk.

The bill has about five weeks to be approved, because the legislature wraps up regular business on April 22nd.

I can just see the Republicans standing in front of the DMV with the papers waving in their hands saying how this proves their is voter fraud and that ACORN* is taking over the world.

*Yes, I know that ACORN is defunct, but there are some on the right already claiming this is a conspiracy to lull people.

ACORN Answers Their Critics

via Open Left:

The attacks on ACORN are spurious to say the least. Here a few key facts that our accusers aren’t telling you.

• ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in LL
  completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.
• ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.
• Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card. ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.
• The rate of incomplete cards for the drive was 5 percent (about 65,000 cards) and the rate of “suspicious” cards was 1.5 percent (about 19,500 cards).

Those are just the highlights; we have an entire section of our website, The Real ACORN, dedicated to telling the truth about ACORN’s work.

ACORN is accustomed to opposition. We've been educating, organizing, and empowering low-income communities for nearly 40 years. Our signature campaigns have included raising the minimum wage through ballot initiative campaigns in 2004 in Florida, and again in 2006 in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Ohio. This work helped provide momentum for that national minimum wage hike that passed in 2007. We have been at the forefront of the fight against the predatory lending practices. We are also the group now helping people save their homes from foreclosure.

We’ve come a long way in nearly 40 years: from a small group of women on welfare in Little Rock, Arkansas coming together in the summer of 1970 to the national bogeyman for the Right in their desperate attempts to cling to power here at the end of 2008. I can tell you that you make some enemies when you advocate with and for poor people against policies and practices that discriminate and keep communities from thriving. But we've never seen anything like this.

And now, in the past few weeks alone, ACORN staffers have received death threats in Ohio and Rhode Island, and offices have been vandalized in Washington and Massachusetts. Numerous threatening and racist phone calls have been made to ACORN offices across the country. As the Right’s actions have made plain, what’s at stake here is not simply what happens on November 4th, but whether or not merican citizens will be able to exercise their most basic right: the right to vote.

This week we’ve begun to carry the fight back to the Republicans. On Monday we showed that the New Mexico GOP was falsely accusing Latino and African-American registrants, many of them first-time voters, of illegally voting in the June primary. When confronted with the evidence the GOP tried to run from the story.

On Tuesday we held house parties with ACORN members in 17 cities across the country to celebrate the release of a fantastic new video by Brave New Films debunking the outrageous lies.

On Wednesday we released a report called “Insult to Injury” about a GOP election strategy for suppressing votes by challenging voters at the polls using foreclosure filings as a basis to prove the voter no longer lives at that address. The report shows that in six states, the margin in the 2004 Presidential Election was smaller than the number of people who have faced foreclosure in 2008: Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin. Caging efforts in these states can have an impact on the outcome of the 2008 election.

ACORN Is Not The Problem

I remember two years ago when various Republican legislators from each state had their own perverted version of a performing art stunt in which the legislators would stand in front of a house, usually in the inner city or other poorer area of a major city, waving papers they said had a list of thousands of names of fraudulent voters, and use almost the same speech to demand voter suppression. It turned out that these lists were bogus, and there was no mass conspiracy to steal the election. Not by the Democrats anyway. The Republicans obsession with trying to put the fear of voter fraud into people reached the point where any US Attorney with enough integrity to say that there was no conspiracy, was summarily fired.

Now the Republicans are up to the same shenanigans, but this time, ACORN is their bogeyman.

In the Seattle Post Intellingcer, there is an article this morning about the ACORN issue. Basically, it sums it up as that it is not ACORN that is the problem, but the individual canvassers:

But however deplorable the behavior of ACORN workers in submitting phony registrations for the likes of cartoon characters and sports stars, it seems unlikely that the group's misdeeds will affect many votes in November.

In issuing his dire warning in the debate, McCain apparently conflated voter-registration fraud with voter fraud. Voter-registration fraud -- at least, of the type ACORN workers committed in Seattle last year and allegedly engaged in elsewhere this year -- is annoying, potentially costly to taxpayers and certainly illegal, but not, by itself, a serious threat to democratic foundations.

Voter fraud, on the other hand, can change the outcome of elections.

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a Republican, said last year that the ACORN case in Seattle had nothing to do with manipulating outcomes and everything to do with the workers' efforts to keep their $8-an-hour jobs. If anyone was defrauded, it was ACORN, an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

"The defendants ... cheated their employers to get paid for work they did not actually perform," Satterberg said. "The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets."

[...]

Voter fraud occurs when voters deliberately cast ineligible ballots. For example, a voter may fill out, sign and return a mail ballot sent to a fellow resident who recently died. Or a voter could impersonate an eligible voter and register and vote in that person's name. Or a voter who is not a U.S. citizen could nonetheless sign the oath of citizenship on the registration form and be placed on the rolls. Proven cases of voter fraud are rare.

Another type of elections fraud involves crimes committed by elections workers, such as creating bogus registrations and then filling out and counting ballots under those entries. McCain has not suggested that might occur in November.

Of course, facts like this won't slow the Republicans from trying to make ACORN into the Willie Horton of 2008*. This is even more clearly limned by the erudite Brew City Brawler, who highlights the fact that the recently announced FBI investigation into ACORN is purely a political stunt by the Republicans in a desperate effort to maintain what little control they may after the upcoming election.

The bigger concern should be the concerted effort across the country by the Republicans to blatantly prevent eligible voters from exercising their Constitutional right to vote. Fortunately, their scheme is so blatantly unconstitutional that even the conservative Supreme Court of the United States couldn't back up their efforts at voter suppression.

Tis a sad thing for the Republicans that they can not win on policies, nor even with their string of negative personal attacks. They have to resort to oppression and intimidation just to have a chance of minimizing the losses they are sure to face on November 4.

* The line was so good I had to steal it from Gretchen Schuldt.