Criminalizing Political Involvement

Is there a nonprofit group in your town that is registering voters? The League of Women Voters maybe? The Boy Scouts? Tell them to watch out - the Voter Suppression League is out to get them.

Digby:

Here's another example of what's becoming increasingly clear is a systematic program to dismantle the institutional left:

Last month, scores of public officials across Los Angeles County opened their mail to find nearly identical requests for information: Members of the Los Angeles City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, the Community Redevelopment Agency and Community College District Board of Trustees, the city of Long Beach and untold others were asked to produce records relating to the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. It was the first blow, silently delivered, in what could be a nasty fight, of a sort that is becoming increasingly common in American and California politics.

LAANE, as it's known, is an 18-year-old advocacy organization that seeks to fashion and influence public policy relating to jobs, the environment and community development. The group, widely perceived as having a strong liberal slant, has a staff of 45 people and an annual budget of $4 million, and it is headed by a shrewd executive director, Madeline Janis. Housed in a tiny suite of offices just west of downtown (LAANE rents the space from the union UNITE-HERE), its modest quarters give little evidence of its impact, which is profound. In project after project -- from winning passage of the city's Living Wage Ordinance to revamping the way the Los Angeles port handles truck traffic to reimagining the region's approach to recycling -- LAANE has shown itself to be one of Southern California's most potent political organizations.

That has made it plenty of enemies, and one of them is now quietly but unmistakably striking back. The group that filed the requests for information under the California Public Records Act is called MB Public Affairs, a Sacramento-based operation that specializes in "opposition research," the art of ferreting out dirt on one's enemies. MB Public Affairs is headed by Mark Bogetich, a garrulous operative known to his friends as "Bogey," who has helped a number of Republican candidates neutralize their opponents...

When MB Public Affairs filed more than 50 public records requests for information on LAANE, it was not a casual act. It was almost certainly intended to find something damaging, and it's costing someone serious money. One operative who knows this business well estimated the price of such a digging campaign at roughly $50,000.

The politics of personal destruction have turned into the politics of institutional destruction. No evidence is needed since the real intent is to smear through innuendo and intimidate public figures through guilt by association.

The left could make them pay a price for this by similarly going after the massive rightwing infrastructure and wingnut welfare, but it wouldn't be polite.

See, only Dirty Fucking Hippies and their ni**ermuslinterrist fellow travelers need voter registration drives.

Ril Murkins go to church, where they get registered to vote and a list of candidates to vote for. No thinking required.

Just a Reminder that Breitbart is a Lying Scumbag

From Brad Friedman:

Rightwing activists and propagandists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, employees of con-artist and propagandist Andrew Breitbart, may not use the First Amendment as an excuse for breaking the law in California, according to a federal judge's ruling (last month).

Judge M. James Lorenz rejected the defendants' argument and motion for summary judgment in federal court, as part of the civil lawsuit filed against them by former San Diego ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera.

Giles had previously thrown O'Keefe under a bus by arguing that she should not be held accountable at all for violating California's Invasion of Privacy Act [CA Penal Code § 632], since he, not she, was actually wearing the hidden video camera used to secretly tape their conversations with Vera, even after they had asked if their meeting would be kept confidential.

For his part, O'Keefe, a convicted federal criminal, argued that he was allowed to violate the law because the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protected him as a "journalist". The judge ruled against the defendants on all points...

According to Maria Dinzeo of Courthouse News Service:

Juan Carlos Vera claimed James O'Keefe III and Hannah Giles visited his office in August 2009, and conspired to create video and audio tapes of him, even after asking him if their conversation would be confidential.

...

[Lorenz ruled] that the law "is directed to the surreptitious recording of confidential communications and not the manner or method of recording the conversation." Given the meaning of the word "record," Lorenz found Giles equally responsible.

Lorenz also rejected O'Keefe's motion for judgment on the pleadings, in which he argued that First Amendment protections for journalists supersede the California Privacy Act. Since there was a mutual understanding that the conversation was confidential, Lorenz found that the privacy law "is not an overbroad intrusion on exposé newsgathering in which O'Keefe participates."

"Exposé newsgathering" is not what O'Keefe traffics in, as demonstrated again most recently by, ironically enough, the "news" website of Fox "News" host Glenn Beck after a similarly deceptive and secretly video taped smear of an NPR employee by O'Keefe last March.

But O'Keefe's long track record of deceptive video hit-jobs was not at issue in this particular legal argument.

In his ruling [PDF], Judge Lorenz highlighted specific portions of the CA law which is violated by "Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records the confidential communication."

The ruling goes on to further cite the statute which reads "The term 'confidential communication' includes any communication carried on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto."

"California's law is quite clear," Lorenz wrote in response to the First Amendment arguments by O'Keefe and Giles, "that persons who engage in news gathering are not permitted to violate criminal laws in the process."

O'Keefe and Giles were sued by Vera last summer, after an investigation by California's Attorney General found that the pair had likely violated the CA Privacy Act by secretly taping workers at ACORN. The duo were spared criminal charges for violation of the same law after bargaining for immunity in exchange for finally providing law enforcement with the unedited videos of their secretly taped meetings with ACORN employees.

After examining the unedited video tapes, the CA AG echoed all other independent investigations of the tapes published by Breitbart, to determine that they had been "severely edited" to present a false portrait of ACORN and of the meetings with workers there.

The AG found the CA ACORN workers "committed no violation of criminal law." Previously, a New York District Attorney investigation also found "no criminality" in the "highly edited" video tapes of ACORN workers there.

SNIP

ACORN had long been targeted by Rightwingers due largely to their years-long success in legally registering millions of legal low- and middle-income citizens to vote. Most such voters tend to vote for Democrats.

Despite persistent, yet evidence-free, claims by the Right over many years that ACORN participated in "voter fraud," there is no known evidence of even a single fraudulent vote ever having been cast in any election due to an improper registration by any ACORN worker.

Read the whole thing.

Repugs Fan Voter Fraud Hysteria While Committing Election Fraud Behind the Scenes

The examples of both false accusations against Democratic voters and accurate cases of fraud by repugs are coming fast and furious.

Karoli at Crooks and Liars:

If you can't win the vote fairly, suppress voters. This has been a Republican tactic for years, and it's running rampant in Wisconsin. While polls are showing Russ Feingold at a shocking disadvantage to his teabagger opponent Ron Johnson, the GOP and Americans for Prosperity are working behind the scenes on a voter suppression scam that is on a far wider scale, but no different than Republicans have used for years.

Here's how it works: A mailer is sent to registered voters. Any mailers returned by the post office are put in a database and those voters are submitted to be purged from voting rolls. Of course, the targets are never Republican voters. They're Democrats, and generally minority voters in particular. Here's a better explanation from the Brennan Center for Justice:

Voter caging is the practice of sending mail to addresses on the voter rolls, compiling a list of the mail that is returned undelivered, and using that list to purge or challenge voters registrations on the grounds that the voters on the list do not legally reside at their registered addresses. Supporters of voter caging defend the practice as a means of preventing votes cast by ineligible voters. Voter caging, however, is notoriously unreliable. If it is treated (unjustifiably) as the sole basis for determining that a voter is ineligible or does not live at the address at which he or she registered, it can lead to the unwarranted purge or challenge of eligible voters. …Moreover, the practice has often been targeted at minority voters, making the effects even more pernicious. [Brennan Center, “A Guide to Voter Caging,” 6/29/07]

SNIP

One Wisconsin Now has uncovered this plot with evidence, but don't assume this is limited to Wisconsin. I guarantee you it isn't. They are targeting as many states as they can, but particularly swing states. Expect Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona just to name a few to have the exact same operations afoot.

Voter suppression undermines democracy. It is a bully tactic to disenfranchise minority and young voters. If you're as angry about this as I am, consider visiting Save Wisconsin's Vote and taking action.

Read the whole thing.

From Talking Points Memo:

Remember the dire warnings and shrill allegations of voter fraud surrounding the 2008 election? That ACORN would steal it, that the New Black Panthers were intimidating voters, that fraud across the county would be "rampant?"

They never panned out. ACORN no longer exists. (Although that hasn't stopped 20 percent of the American public from believing they'll try to steal the election.) The DOJ found that the New Black Panthers incident was isolated -- although that case found new life in allegations against the Justice Department itself (more on that below). A five-year effort by the Bush DOJ to weed out fraud, an effort the Obama team said was designed to suppress minority voter turnout, turned up "virtually no evidence."

Voter fraud "exists, and anyone who denies it has no credibility," J. Christian Adams told TPMmuckraker recently. "But it doesn't affect the outcome of elections as much as people say. I don't think that if there's 100 or 1,000 dead voters in, let's say, Texas ... I don't think it's going to affect the outcome of statewide elections."

And yet, with all the evidence against them, the fearmongers of voter fraud -- a mantle most recently taken up by the tea party -- soldier on.

SNIP

Other cases trumpeted by the right have similar racial undertones. In Harris County, Texas, a tea party offshoot called True The Vote and the Republican registrar of voters have accused a low-income voter registration program of falsifying thousands of applications in an effort to conduct "an organized and systematic attack." True The Vote says they found the alleged fraud by scouring voter registration records in districts with a high number of households with six or more registered voters -- which also happened to be the predominantly poor, black voting districts. True The Vote is now advocating for proof of citizenship to be required at the polls. And the Tea Party Nation has told its members to "steal their good idea."

SNIP

Amidst the fears, voting experts say they want to make sure that those who become poll watchers know the rules of the polling place so legitimate voters are not unfairly challenged.

"We just want to make sure that everyone is clear on the rules -- that voters know their rights, that these groups know what they are and aren't allowed to do," said Tova Wang, Senior Democracy Fellow at Demos.

"Every single election there are these allegations of voter fraud that turn out to be mostly untrue and every year we find that there might be a very small handful of voter fraud cases but nothing on the order of what is alleged," Wang said.

Read the whole thing.

Reachel Slajda at TPMwith the details of the outrageous Texas case:

The events over the last month in Harris County, Texas offer a crystal-clear example of how voter fraud allegations work, with a Tea Party group alleging fraud, a minority registration group alleging suppression and defamation, the county registrar declaring war and the state Dems jumping into the fray with a lawsuit of their own.

The Tea Party group even went so far as to claim that the headquarters of the voter registration group is the "New Black Panthers' office."

What happens in Harris County is important for the rest of the country: Harris is the largest county in Texas. Experts say that if enough of the eligible voters there register to vote, and then vote in 2012, it could change the way Texas votes in 2012. With 34 electoral votes, that could change the outcome of the election itself.

Read the whole thing.

And finally, also from TPM, proof that individual voter fraud is committed by rebpugs who know better:

The Republican nominee for the top job overseeing Indiana's elections has a bit of a voting problem himself.

For one thing, Republican Secretary of State nominee Charlie White moved out of Fishers, Indiana, six months before stepping down from his post on the town council there. The town attorney has ruled that White's disputed town council votes from that interim period will still stand.

But according to the Indianapolis Star, White's troubles don't end there. He is reportedly being probed for committing voter fraud because he registered to vote with his old address, and voted in the primary in his old district.

White had served on the Fishers Town Council for 10 years, including the time between his move from Fishers last March, until his announcement of the move and resignation in September.

Since then, local Democrats have been putting pressure on him to call off his Secretary of State campaign. And the Dems want a probe to look at White's failure to report his change of address when registering to vote. State Democratic party chair Dan Parker alleged that this constitutes voter fraud since White voted in his old precinct.

Read the whole thing.

Educate yourself. Find out how your state law both protects and encourages voting. Volunteer to work the polls, either officially as an election official or unofficially as an observer to catch voter intimidation.

This is the core of American democracy. Every person prevented from voting diminishes the democracy and civil rights of the rest of us.

ACORN's Real Crime: Saving New Orleans After Katrina

This is what repug election-frauders and fraidy-cat dems destroyed, not for what ACORN did wrong, but for what it did right.

John Atlas in The Nation:

A week after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans—while government officials and charities were still discussing how to send aid to the area—ACORN was already moving into action. ACORN staffers quickly discovered that many displaced African-American homeowners were in danger of losing their homes. Banks were giving their middle-class, mostly white customers ninety days or more to make their payments, but borrowers who had subprime, high-interest loans (like many black homeowners in the Lower Ninth Ward) were given only one month. Three weeks after the storm, ACORN released a report exposing the industry's double standard and demanded meetings with lenders. Along with labor unions and consumer groups, it successfully negotiated plans to prevent foreclosures for dozens of homeowners. This campaign was only one of many victories, large and small, that ACORN achieved by mobilizing Katrina survivors to confront banks, insurance companies and public officials.

SNIP

Since the 2008 presidential election, ACORN has been the victim of a ferocious attack by the GOP, Fox News and Andrew Breitbart, including false accusations of "voter fraud" and the infamous doctored "pimp and prostitute" videos. This storm ACORN couldn't weather. Although the organization was subsequently exonerated of any wrongdoing, it dissolved itself as funders and Democratic allies abandoned the group. ACORN was dismantled, but its legacy—in New Orleans and elsewhere—continues. One group, A Community Voice, led by former ACORN leaders Vanessa Gueringer and Gwen Adams, continues ACORN's mission in New Orleans, regularly confronting local officials over issues like policing and the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward. The group is one of at least a dozen former ACORN affiliates that are now independent—but continuing the work of organizing the poor for power in cities across the country.

This article is adapted from John Atlas's Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group.

Read the whole thing.

Biting the Hand That Feeds Us

The only thing Democrats do better than snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is betray and cripple their allies in a futile attempt to win approval from their enemies.

Case in point: ACORN

Digby explains:

One of the dumber moves the Democrats made in recent times was allowing ACORN to go undefended because those silly costumed miscreants doctored some tapes to portray the ACORN workers as idiots and criminals. Its destruction may end up being the most important conservative movement action of the era because of what it did to Democratic infrastructure:

A Summary of Recent Accomplishments (pdf)

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is one of the nation’s largest and most successful community organization of lower income families. Since 1970 ACORN has been building solidly rooted and powerful community organizations that are committed to social and economic justice, and have taken action and won victories on thousands of issues of concern to our members. Our priorities include living wages for low income workers; an end to predatory financial practices and foreclosures; decent and affordable housing, for first time homebuyers and tenants; public schools that work for all students; voting rights, and full participation in our electoral system; a path to citizenship for new immigrants to this country; and an equitable response to natural disasters such as Katrina. ACORN achieves these goals by building community organizations that have the power to win changes – through direct action, negotiation, legislation, and voter participation.

The following report describes some of ACORN’s major accomplishments in these areas over the past decade. In addition, every day local ACORN chapters are taking action and winning on issues as diverse as getting traffic lights at dangerous intersections, increasing police protection in their neighborhoods, and forcing landlords to make necessary repairs. These activities are the building blocks that help the organization recruit new members, teach the skills of public engagement, and build the power that allows ACORN to take action and win on the critical issues that face our constituency:

The first few listed are all laudable community organizing activities. But it's the final one that made them a long standing GOP target:

More Income for Poor Americans

Taking on the Predatory Lenders
Passing Laws to Stop Foreclosures
Preserving and Creating Affordable Housing
Rebuilding After Katrina
Improving Schools in our Communities
Stopping RAL Rip-offs and Providing Free Tax Prep

Bringing New Voters Into Elections

ACORN’s non-partisan voter registration drives have successfully helped build an American electorate that is beginning to look more like America — with more African Americans, Latinos and young people voting in 2008 than ever before. ACORN has collected and submitted nearly 3 million voter registration applications since 2003: 1.152 million in 2003-4, 540,000 in 2006, and close to 1.3 million in 2007-8. Based on our knowledge of voter registration drives, we estimate that 70%—more than 2 million—of these applications resulted in a successfully registered new voter or a necessary address change to keep a voter on the rolls. Our best estimates indicate that ACORN’s 2008 voter registration and GOTV work, combined with the continuing impact of ACORN’s registration drives from 2003 through 2006, helped bring approximately one million voters to the polls last year.

Maybe the Democrats didn't think all that matters, but the Republicans certainly did. They worked for years to take out ACORN and that little jackass finally got it done. Believe me, it wasn't because they were worried about "voting integrity." They were worried that in the new white minority world, too many people of color would vote. We know what that means. (They tend not to vote for the racist party.)

The Democrats showed no instinct for self-preservation on this one, which isn't surprising.

In case you forgot, Congressional Democrats tossed ACORN to the frightwing bullies not because ACORN did anything wrong, but because the MSM got punked by a video fake a five-year-old could have seen through.

So, the New York Times finally ran a correction. But after six weeks of "considering" the errors in its own reporting, the so called paper of record's correction of its misleading ACORN story, came way, way, WAY to late.

The Times' correction ran the same day that the anti-poverty group ACORN called it quits, after a year under attack -- and a day after the paper's public editor wrote that yes indeed, the paper has "mistakenly reinforced falsehoods" from right wing activists against the group.

When activists released videos appearing to show ACORN workers offering advice to people posing as a pimp and a prostitute, the Times fell for an editing trick. The videos gave the impression that two activists were dressed in outlandish costumes when they visited ACORN offices. They weren't. Video transcripts also contradicted what the video makers claimed, namely that ACORN staffers appeared to endorse talk of using underage girls as prostitutes.

In fact, the transcript reveals that ACORN staffers believed they were discussing a plan to protect two girls. The Times also fell for that.

Here's something to consider. The paper fact-checks allegations from left leaning groups -- to death. The contemplation-of-a-correction story is less about bad reporting than bias. The Times seems to have considered ACORN guilty from the start.

If you'd like more details about how the con worked, Eric Boehlert at Media Matters explains.

Cat is Out of the Bag: ACORN is SMERSH

We have to admit it now, my dusky, urban comrades in evil. 52 percent of republicans have figured out that ACORN stole the election for Obama last year.

Yes, 9,500,000 votes for McCain/Palin were ripped from the trusting hands of loyal Americans and given to a muslin socialist - a Democrat - who could never have won a fair election.

We thought we'd gotten away with it - who, after all, could believe that an underfunded, understaffed, disorganized collection of uneducated, unemployed, dark-skinned poor people from the inner city could steal that many votes in white, rural, republican enclaves like Virginia and Ohio and Iowa and Indi-fucking-ana?

Steve M:

Of course, right-wingers routinely ascribe superpowers to people they don't like. Bill Clinton -- who couldn't get a health-care bill passed, couldn't get gays in the military approved, couldn't retain congressional majorities, and couldn't have illicit sex without getting impeached -- was somehow powerful enough to have dozens of people killed and get away with it; Barack Obama is believed to have similar powers.

And now we have SuperACORN. (As you may also know, Doug Hoffman is raising funds with a letter claiming that ACORN stole the recent election in New York's 23rd congressional district, even though, as the local Watertown Daily Times points out, he has "provided no evidence to support his claims." I supposed he'd argue that ACORN is so powerful that empirical evidence of the deceit may not even exist.)

If there are any responsible journalists out there and they'd like to perform a public service, they should go up to NY-23 and just report on the vote-counting process -- specifically addressing the question of whether ACORN is even a significant factor in local elections, much less whether it can pump thousands of fake votes into the system while all electoral participants just twiddle their thumbs. (I don't care what Erick Erickson or Glenn Beck thinks, I just don't believe all the locals, across the political spectrum, would simply look the other way and overlook the fact that the fix was in.) Such a report wouldn't change anyone's mind on the right, but the more wingnuts whine, the more likely it is that swing voters will start to believe what they say about SuperACORN. This nonsense shouldn't be ignored. It should be debunked.

No chance - we've been discovered. We were hoping to keep it a secret for at least another year, but it doesn't matter now. It's too late for Caribou Barbie and Real America to save themselves.

The New Socialist Order is in place. Forced abortions for anti-choice christians, death panels for white republicans and mandatory gay sex for five-year-olds is just the beginning. By 2012, Glenn Beck will be begging us to let him emigrate to France.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Alan Grayson, Light and Dark

Just when Alan Grayson's delighted takedowns of vicious repugs approach self-parody, he reminds us that he remains laser-focused on the business of restoring the nation to democracy.

First, the light:

During an appearance yesterday on Hardball, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) jokingly suggested that former Vice President Dick Cheney is a vampire.

Chris Matthews asked Grayson what he thinks of Cheney's attacks on President Obama for "dithering" on Afghanistan.

"Well, my response is -- and by the way, I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes, because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he's talking," said Grayson. "But my response is this: He's just angry because the president doesn't shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?"

Even Matthews, no Cheney fan himself, was shocked: "Oh God -- we got to keep a level here. Let me ask you this: Don't you have any Republican friends?"

Grayson laughed, and said that some of his best friends are Republicans. Check out the exchange at the 5:25 mark here:

When a commenter called Grayson "ballsy" for saying such things while representing a republican district, I responded:

Being ballsy is the only thing that will SAVE his seat.

Alan Grayson is absolutely the only living Democrat who understands that the way to win ANY election is to stand up on your hind legs and say, "This is what I stand for and anybody who doesn't agree can fuck off and die."

That's the way repugs have been winning for 30 years. It's the way dems used to win for the 50 years before that.

And it's the ONLY way dems are going to hang on to Congress and the White House - by emulating Alan Grayson.

But Alan Grayson doesn't need me or anyone else to defend him; he's busy in Congress defending the Constitution from ravaging repugs:

You might expect a man who graduated from Harvard Law School with honors, and was later a law clerk in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (1984-85) under Robert Bork, Ruth Ginsburg, and Antonin Scalia to know his stuff concerning the Constitution. And with that kind of background you might also reasonably assume such a man would not suffer fools gladly when presented with an alternate view of reality on U.S. Constitutional matters. Grayson uses the words of William Rehnquist and James Madison to destroy a rather hapless Paul Broun.

This is Rep. Alan Grayson and Rep. Paul Broun discussing a bill to deny funds to one specific named organization in a Science and Technology markup. Such a bill is known as 'a bill of attainder'.

Grayson: "Thank you. I'd like to ask the gentleman from Georgia a few questions, and I'll yield to him for the purpose of having answers to these questions. Um, does the gentleman from Georgia know what a Bill of Attainder is?"

SNIP (Lots of Grayson demanding Broun justify his unconstitutional attack on ACORN and the repug flailing around, until ....)

Grayson: "Uh, listen, we, we are trampling on people's Constitutional rights. And I think it's unfortunate that the mania that exists on the other side of the aisle regarding this one organization, and we know why that mania exists, it's because they've registered an awful lot of Democrats, continues to distort and waste the time of this committee and many other committees here in Congress. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! I yield my remaining 5 seconds."

Read the whole transcript here.

Nothing can make up for 30 years of horrific damage to the nation and world of Democrats cowering in corners while repugs wreaked havoc, but Alan Grayson is coming damn close.

ACORN Idiocy Just Latest Skirmish in Repug War On Poor People

As I explained last month, the real source of the wingnut freakazoid hysteria over ACORN is the bedrock repug belief that helping poor people should be illegal.

At The Nation, Chris Hayes takes it a step further by exposing the accountability gap that allows repugs and their corporate owners to avoid all responsibility for stealing billions from the taxpayers while Congress throws a hissy fit over ACORN's hard-earned pennies.

But if the disconcerting contents of the videos were the proximate cause of ACORN's Congressional rebuke, it is the organization's mission that made it a target. Since the 1970s, ACORN has committed itself steadfastly to building power for poor people. "Unlike almost any other institution on the left," a former organizer told me, "they constantly gravitate toward the most fucked-over people." Not surprisingly, this makes America's right wing furious. O'Keefe says he was inspired to pull the stunt after watching a video that showed ACORN engaging in civil disobedience by breaking the padlock on a foreclosed home and escorting its locked-out owner inside. The video, O'Keefe told the Washington Post, made him "upset."

For the past several years, reactionaries of every stripe have waged a relentless campaign aimed at delegitimizing ACORN, and the organization's manifold dysfunctions have given them a steady stream of ammunition. "When I was working for them we'd hired all these low-income people, and we couldn't even get them their paychecks on time," another former ACORN organizer told me. "We were losing really good employees. It comes from this place where there's so much work to do, we don't do logistics because there's always a crisis. But logistics matter."

SNIP

For all its organizational problems, ACORN does vital, indispensable, unglamorous work: it trains legions of organizers, builds grassroots leadership and wages disciplined and effective local and statewide campaigns, such as its minimum-wage effort in Florida in 2004.

But it is hardly the colossus of right-wing mythology. For proof of ACORN's meager influence, one need only look at the swift action by Congress to cut off its funding and compare that to the fate of other government contractors under a cloud of far more damning revelations. Like, for instance, Blackwater. As my colleague Jeremy Scahill has reported, a recent federal audit suggests that Blackwater may owe the government $55 million allegedly for failing to meet the terms of just one of its federal contracts. Five of its employees face murder charges for their role in the massacre of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. Yet Blackwater's $217 million security contract in Iraq was just extended indefinitely by the Obama administration. Or consider former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which received $80 million in contract bonuses to provide electrical wiring in Iraq; so far, sixteen soldiers and two contractors have died from electrocution from that wiring, precipitating a comprehensive Defense Department review. And in what was perhaps the most buried news story of the summer, there was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's $2.3 billion fraud settlement with the Justice Department for its illegal promotion of painkiller Bextra and other drugs. According to fedspending.org, Pfizer had more than $73 million in federal contracts in 2007 alone.

But the government contracts of Blackwater, KBR and Pfizer remain intact. (In a delicious bit of irony, the legislation defunding ACORN was written so broadly that Representative Alan Grayson and the Project on Government Oversight have compiled a list of firms they say fit the defunding criteria, and it reads like a Who's Who of the military-industrial complex.)

The disparity in the treatment of Blackwater et al. and ACORN is part of a larger American problem, what might be called the Inequality of Accountability. We diligently apply the principle of accountability to the poor and the powerless, and the principle of forgiveness to the wealthy and powerful.

Even before it was punked by a couple of right-wing twenty-somethings, nobody knew that better than ACORN.

After all, their members see it every day.

Read the whole thing.\

You often hear that the history of civil rights in this country is one long struggle to expand voting rights to all citizens.

I say the history of human rights in this country is one long struggle to stop rich people from fucking over poor people.

Anti-ACORN: Because helping poor people should be illegal

I'm so used to the constant demonization of the poor in this country that I haven't been able to muster the appropriate outrage over the lies and false accusations against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Thank goodness for Joe Conason, who never stops calling out the poor-bashers.

The right-wing crusade against ACORN is a far bigger fraud than any misdeeds a few employees might have committed.

SNIP

Like so many conservative attacks, the crusade against ACORN has been highly exaggerated and even falsified to create a demonic image that bears little resemblance to the real organization. Working in the nation's poorest places, and hiring the people who live there, ACORN is not immune to the pathologies that can afflict institutions in those communities. As a large nonprofit handling many millions of dollars, it has suffered from mismanagement at the top as well -- although there is nothing unique in that, either.

Yet ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished. No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a "pimp and ho," but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). And while the idea of getting housing assistance for a brothel was clever, what ACORN really does, every day, is help those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Perhaps the congressional investigation now demanded by some Republican politicians would be a useful exercise, if conducted impartially. A fair investigation might begin to dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by right-wing media outlets.

Among the most popular canards on the right, repeated constantly by conservative pundits and politicians, is that ACORN has been found guilty of engaging in deliberate voter fraud, using federal funds. In reality, ACORN has registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the country over the past five years -- a laudable record with a very low incidence of fraud of any kind.

Over the past several years, a handful of ACORN employees have admitted falsifying names and signatures on registration cards, in order to boost the pay they received. When ACORN officials discovered those cases, they informed the state authorities and turned in the miscreants. (That was why the Bush Justice Department's blatant attempt to smear ACORN with rushed, election-timed indictments became a national scandal for Republicans rather than Democrats.) The proportion of fraud is infinitesimal. For example, a half-dozen ACORN workers were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election. They had completed fewer than two dozen false registrations -- out of more than a million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. The mythology that suggests that thousands or even millions of illegal registrants voted is itself a fraud.

SNIP

To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator. Indeed, the indignation of the congressional Republicans screaming about ACORN and the phony streetwalker is diluted by the presence of at least two confirmed prostitution clients -- Rep. Ken Calvert and Sen. David Vitter -- in their midst. Neither of those right-wing johns has been even mildly chastised by their moralistic peers. Nobody is cutting off their federal funding.

ACORN has pledged to institute reforms, with the appointment of a distinguished outside panel to oversee that process. Let us hope they succeed. Even now they seem far more likely to improve their performance -- and to be more sincere in their intentions -- than the Washington hypocrites who are trying to destroy them.

Read the whole thing.

h/t Crooks and Liars.