The Kaplan Daily devotes a whole Q&A to the UNFOLDING ACORN SCANDAL.
In the interests of bipartisanship, I am going to name off the top of my head a bunch of Democratic scandals that I find much more troubling:
- Jack Murtha’s institute for self-enrichment.
- That big fund-raiser who took out the fraudulent loans.
- The various back-door deals the Obama administration cut with special interests on health care.
I’m not suggesting all three are important. I tend to think that the first one is without a doubt quite bad. The other two I’m less sure. But I can’t see how, in a sane world, all three stories aren’t much more important than the pimps and hos stories.
I’m not suggesting that ACORN is blameless, but their biggest crime is, of course, that they employ a lot of black people.
From Woodward and Bernstein to Malkin and Beck. Quite a descent.
PG
ACORN’s problem is that they employ people who don’t seem to be aspiring to get much further in their careers, and therefore lack the caution that should be a basic requirement for working in any liberal organization these days (ditto for O’Keefe’s previous target, Planned Parenthood).
If you don’t think you’re going to advance any further than where you are right now, and also don’t feel yourself to be in a position of responsibility… hey, why not screw around with two kids who are dressed for a fraternity “Pimps’n’Hos” party by telling them that you’ve murdered your ex-husbands, or that they can claim random children as dependents? Might as well get some entertainment out of your job.
Guster
What’s the story with the report that the ACORN guy actually reported everything to the police? I guess I’m being naive, but doesn’t that sorta undermine the scandal a little?
Or was that at a different office, or something?
Cat Lady
I know you’re talking about the WaPo, but who’s Kaplan?
Zifnab
Jack Murtha is just doing what every other Republican (and many other Democrat) Congressmen wishes they was doing, too. You can’t deal with that scandal, because then you’re shitting where you eat.
Fraudulant loan fund raising story sounds like Bernie Madoff redux. Old news.
And as for cutting insurance companies sweet heart deals – they’re supposed to be getting good deals. They’re private industry. That’s the way the system works.
Now ACORN, that’s about getting poor minority citizens registered to vote. And that’s freak’n intolerable. The difference is key. You’re talking about money, money, and money. They want to talk about votes. The other shit just doesn’t matter.
The Grand Panjandrum
Maybe just looking at CREW’s most corrupt list is enough. Congress could be renamed Crooks ‘R US.
Leo
@Cat Lady: Kaplan test prep. company owns the Post.
SenyorDave
I called to cancel the Post about three months ago. I accepted their counteroffer that lowered my cost per week from $4.50 to 75 cents for 6 months. I have to cancel now, but I’m pissed. Never in my adult life have I been w/o a daily paper.
PG
Also, that Q&A mentions the ABC undercover investigation of Food Lion, but neglects to note that ABC lost that case based on the duty of loyalty to an employer (i.e. if you’re an ABC journalist and you sign up to work at Food Lion, you owe a duty of loyalty to Food Lion not to be there for the purpose of serving ABC rather than serving Food Lion).
Martin
Nemazee is a pretty big story, but not how the media thinks.
It’s a small (but valid) story for his role in getting Obama (and others) elected, but the real story is how it shows that Madoff wasn’t an isolated case of people ripping off Wall Street, and how poorly run our banks must be that they can run 1/3 billion dollars out the door without realizing that there’s nothing backing it up.
It’s always tempting to write guys like Madoff off as super-geniuses that nobody could have predicted, but when a 2nd one shows up? Well, then you just know there’s going to be a 3rd, and then a 4th…
PG
I don’t think the Q&A is as awful as Doug apparently believes. People are interested in this ACORN story. The WaPo person answering their questions is actually taking a lot of questions that support ACORN, inasmuch as they point out that O’Keefe cut the video to make it look like the ACORN employees sincerely believed he was a pimp.
I understand what Doug is saying about this not being important in a “what will change our country” sense, but I think it’s important for a somewhat factual and objective response to be getting out there. Letting the right’s version of events fester and go without rebuttal (except by the folks at ACORN) is not a good idea.
briber
Kaplan Test Prep is owned by the same folks as Wapo.
Presumably, the concern for factual accuracy and comprehensive coverage of diverse subjects that is at the heart of Kaplan’s business model would of course manifest in a sister business.
patrick
It sells because it is on video. If you could get a movie of John Murtha wearing a pimp hat and sunglasses while accompanied by a semi-hot young chick selling his services to various “contributors”, I am sure it would be on tv non-stop.
Ash Can
I ranted about this in a previous thread, and I’ll post a summary here. There are three reasons the RW noise machine is targeting ACORN: 1) ACORN has been a thorn in the side of big-business and conservative-political interests for decades, 2) it has historical ties, however tenuous, with Barack Obama, 3) it has no experience with, or preparation for, concerted national-level RW smear campaigns, so it can’t fight back.
Corruption, my ass. This is just a way to take a swipe at Obama and the Democrats, pure and simple. That’s your fucking story.
protected static
FTFY.
The Grand Panjandrum
@patrick: Jack Murtha’s War would make a good movie. They could cast Tom Hanks in the part of Jack Murtha … I’m sure Charlie Wilson would get a chuckle out of the irony of that title …
Zifnab
@patrick: These are news organizations. I’m sure they have access to cameras.
The ACORN story might not have been a news story without a couple of conserva-kids doing the actual leg work, I’ll admit. And that’s what makes the John Stewart take on this so funny. The GOP has been after ACORN for years. And two kids with cameras broke this “scandal”? Bill O’Reily should have been able to do this in his sleep. Glenn Beck is running around misspelling Oligarchy on a chalk board to the tune of millions a year, and these children did this on a four digit budget.
If John Murtha isn’t busted read handed, it’s only because journalism in this country is completely dead. No one is even making the most token effort to catch him.
protected static
sigh… Imagine, if you will, my insert tags around ‘register’ and ‘to vote’ working as well as my delete tags around ’employ’…
AkaDad
This is clearly more important than prosecuting those who have allegedly authorized and committed war crimes.
Get a brain.
Ash Can
@PG: …And I’ve taken a deep breath and read your post, and I totally agree with you. So much the better, if it gets any of the bullshit cleared up at all.
Brick Oven Bill
Glenn Beck is a far better journalist than Woodward or Bernstein. All these two did was do a story on a cover-up of some technically illegal political intelligence gathering. Watergate really was not that big of a deal, and Woodward and Bernstein were popular in their circles.
Glenn Beck has raised awareness among millions of Americans about the importance of the Founding Documents, and reports on efforts to do away with them by this government. He has started a whole movement.
As an example of unconstitutional rule, the federal government just yesterday made illegal flavored cigarettes. With the single exception of Menthol cigarettes.
This is not their job, as they in general are only to act on our behalf in times of national crisis, like a war. They are not to mandate cigarette flavors, or tell us how to sneeze.
So I will ask the question. Does the President smoke Menthols? Or was it a special interest provision to appease ACORN?
SpotWeld
Obviously ACORN is positioning itself for the moment when the goverment cordons off the island of Manhattend and makes it a federal prison / FEMA camp.
When the Grand Duke arises, he’ll be working for ACORN
SpotWeld
B.O.B. whatever your doctor has you on, tell him to make it a half-dose
licensed to kill time
I really do not understand the winger obsession with ACORN. I unfortunately spent some time reading Red State and the comments there, and the mindset is truly bizarre.
I mean, I get that they have some overwhelming need to find a conspiracy behind every organization or party they don’t agree with in order to make sense of the crumbling of their worldview and to convince themselves that somebody, anybody is in charge. That they are on the receiving end of some sinister plot to destroy Real America, and only True Patriots recognize this and will ride a la Paul Revere along the Great American Highway, shouting the Truth and Warning The Citizens who will then rise up in some kind of spontaneous Revolt and rid our country of The One and his Minions.
But….ACORN?? Hell, even the name sounds kinda silly.
Singularity
What are you talking about? Jack Murtha’s not black. Neither is Nemazee. How could those guys possibly be doing anything wrong?
No, no. The proper place to look for scandals and criminal activity is where the black people are.
licensed to kill time
Some examples of the Mind of Beck
Read ’em and weep.
James F. Elliott
I am so fucking confused. The only way I can possibly make heads or tails of this conclusion to B.O.B.’s comment is that there is, apparently, some stereotype somewhere that black folks smoke Menthols, and B.O.B. ascribes to it. Because otherwise all llinks between ACORN and the banning of flavored cigarettes escape my powers of reasoning.
MikeJ
Not only do they register black people to vote, they are community organizers. The point is proving that community organizing is itself nefarious.
Makewi
ACORN is more interesting to the press for 3 reasons. First, this is not even remotely their first run in with scandal, but it looks like this time they won’t be coming through unscathed. Second, Like it or not the POTUS has had a long relationship with the organization, and everyone in the press secretly wants to be Woodward and Bernstein. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, pimps and hos = sex and crime, which Americans are fascinated with.
BigSwami
@licensed to kill time:
I understand why the winger obsession with ACORN might be confusing to you. That’s because the wingers won’t admit to anyone, possibly not even themselves, why they hate ACORN so much.
The real reason they are so obsessed with ACORN is here.
Paul L.
I remember when the MOST IMPORTANT STORY EVAH to the nutroots/MSM was a Republican Senator playing footy with a Minneapolis airport policeman.
So that was the reason for the DOJ dropping the Black Panther Voter Intimidation case?
Niceof you to invoke Woodward and Bernstein who were used by W. Mark Felt to get revenge for being passed over as FBI director.
The Grand Panjandrum
OT: David Cay Johnston just published first piece for HuffPo: GOP Favors Public Option For Property, Not People
Best piece yet about the hypocrisy of the GOP when it comes to health care reform.
gwangung
Oh, the bigot speaks again.
I doubt you even know what it’s about, bigot. I’m surprised you have the gall to show your face—you show your backside so often when you run away all the time.
licensed to kill time
@MikeJ:
And could it be that’s because……Obama was a community organizer?!! (I’m doing my best SNL Church Lady voice here)
kay
@licensed to kill time:
Because the only reason the black guy won is because ACORN fixed the results.
Remember how conservatives were frantically posting about how the polls were wrong, and we were not taking the “Wilder Effect” into consideration, and that at the end of the day white people wouldn’t vote for a black person?
They actually believed that.
They’re looking for another explanation for Obama’s election OTHER THAN “a majority of people voted for him”.
They’ve settled on ACORN.
Guster
I just can’t tell snark from serious anymore, but I like to play.
I remember when the MOST IMPORTANT STORY EVAH to the nutroots/MSM was Iraq’s possession of WMD.
Why hasn’t the DOJ pursued a case against Will Smith if they’re so racist?
Sen. McCarthy!
handy
@Paul L.:
Most important? Nah. Abso-frickin-lutely hilarious? Absolutely! And it’s relative importance to other news items of the day can be attributed to far simpler reason than the paranoid one you are suggesting: sex sells, bruva.
wasabi gasp
@Brick Oven Bill: LOL
BOB I LOVE YOU
throws panties at server
Napoleon
@patrick:
How about instead of dressed as a pimp Murtha just takes money from a fake Arab sheik?
youtube.com/watch?v=C2ehCmaQ3Dg
Svensker
Paul L. makes more sense when I flick on the pie filter. What is he on about? Lemon meringue?
cleek
@PG: “ABC lost that case”
yeah, but i will never buy meat at a Food Lion because of that story.
Ash Can
@Makewi: OK, Makewi, be my guest. Fill us in on ACORN’s long, sordid history of scandal. Educate us ignorant liberals once and for all. And don’t forget your links.
Trinity
I think Digby’s post about this is spot on!
MikeJ
@Ash Can: They turned me into a newt.
I got better.
Brick Oven Bill
Back when I smoked regularly, a guy got me hooked on Menthols, and Menthol is a nice cigarette flavor. So this particular federal mandate does not bother me personally. But per Yahoo!answers, menthol is the favorite flavor of black people. 75% of blacks smoke menthols, and only 25% of whites smoke menthols.
This makes me wonder if this was a racist decision on the part of the President. I think he obsesses on these things. But this is not my point. The point is that the federal government has no business telling me that I cannot smoke a peach-flavored cigarette. Here again is the 10th Amendment:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Constitution does not delegate the power to regulate cigarette flavors to the United States. Glenn Beck is the only TV journalist that is reporting on the Constitution, and this is why he is a better journalist than Woodward or Bernstein, who were just being part of the club. Wasabi Gasp do you have a picture?
Cat Lady
@kay:
What I’m really curious about is how they would think about ACORN if McCain won, since he was their keynote speaker in 2006.
jibeaux
The dictionary is looking good these days. I think we need a Mayan calendar explanation. And when we have a “see also” reference, I think whatever comes after that should also be in the dictionary.
handy
Further proof that B.O.B. is a parody, at least at this stage in the game.
OT: Oh, and calamari, mmmmm
kay
I keep thinking of this as cumulative, because that’s how we look at things with a little space and time, so let’s look at the Right’s reaction to Obama’s Presidency, one year in:
1. questioning his birth certificate
2. Sotomayor, “racialist”, and that week-long freak show
3. Gates
4. Tea baggers, racist signs, “ghetto thugs”, etc.
5. Wilson, benefits to immigrants, or whatever his odd outburst was about
6. the green jobs czar hysteria
7. ACORN, over-the-top insane witch hunt
8. Eric Holder, faux-Black Panther accusation
This is not adding up well. I mean, at some point a picture, emerges.
We’ll see. I’m just looking at the total picture. I’ll re-assess in another year, before drawing any hard and fast conclusions, but…looks pretty damn bad, media and Righties.
I’ll be adding to this list.
licensed to kill time
@Trinity:
Manufactured controversy, check!
Subliminal racist association, check!
Vote suppression, check!
I’d say Digby hit the nail on the head.
SpotWeld
LOL-B.O.B-cat says “I can haz menthol flavar”
kay
@Cat Lady:
This has been going on for years. Conservatives are convinced there is massive voter fraud in this country.
They became convinced of that when they started losing elections, so immediately after 2004.
It’s an article of faith. You cannot shake their conviction.
Zifnab
@Brick Oven Bill:
This, from the guy who doesn’t like Wiki because he questions it’s accuracy. Forty billion points of fail for referencing Yahoo!answers for anything but a cheap laugh, BoB.
holykiddingme.com/
Makewi
@Ash Can:
Sure, I’ll share.
General search results
A story of some fraud
Davebo
Great. Eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Food and Drug Administration, Veterans Administration, Dep. of Agriculture, CDC and a host of other extremely popular programs and divisions of government.
You’ll be down to getting the Limbaugh/Beck vote minus their senior citizen listeners which likely constitutes the majority.
Good luck with that!
Persia
@PG: I don’t think the Q&A is as awful as Doug apparently believes. People are interested in this ACORN story.
They’re interested because people keep talking about it. See also tails wagging dogs.
Brachiator
@kay:
From little ACORNS do mighty Wingnut conspiracies grow.
J.W. Hamner
@Brick Oven Bill:
I nominate this for comment of the day! Awesome.
kay
I do wonder about why ACORN and not the Democratic donor.
That has an additional (and timely!) “hook”, namely, how poorly are big banks in this country run, that they lend 75 million dollars on signature to a crook?
Maybe we don’t want to delve into that?
wasabi gasp
@Brick Oven Bill: Without my panties, I just look every other guy in a corset.
SpotWeld
So Makewi is pretty much a textbook case of failure to understand voter fraud vs. registration fraud?
Or just a taxtbook case of failure?
JK
Also from Edward R. Murrow, Ted Koppel, Roger Mudd, Eric Severeid, Howard K. Smith, Sander Vanocur, Edwin Newman, Marvin Kalb, and John Chancellor to Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Chris Matthews, David Gregory, and Mike Huckabee.
IndyLib
@kay:
You forgot how poor people being allowed to get mortgages through the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing crisis.
kay
@SpotWeld:
They’ve never gotten the mechanics of elections. Never.
Try working with them at a polling place. Really. You wanna bash your head against a wall. Flow chart, bulleted lists, pict-o-graphs….
They have a knee-jerk reaction when the voter presents for the ballot: “no. After “no” they go to “provisional ballot”. It’s like a endurance test.
Ideologically, and I’m being serious here, they do not buy the basic premise that there is a right to vote. They think it’s a privilege, like driving.
That is an unbridgeable divide.
freelancer
@SpotWeld:
Erm, yes.
General Winfield Stuck
@Makewi:
Hi Scarlett,
doing similar political work as Acorn.
JK
OT
America’s favorite loon to ever serve in the House of Reps, besides Michele BTO, James Traficant will be interviewed by Chris Matthews on Hardball tonight.
kay
@IndyLib:
I didn’t forget it. Former President Bush gave a series of speeches on how he had expanded homeownership among minorities.
That’s gone down the rabbit hole, but Mr. Bush was strutting around bragging about how progressive he was there for a while.
El Cid
You think that if there was a *different*, non-ACORN organization of primarily black community organizers fighting for the rights and interests of the homeless, tenants, and poor home-owners, primarily among communities of color, even registering such people to vote, that ‘conservatives’ and Reaganites and anti-liberal Democrats wouldn’t still hate them?
Really?
Bullshit.
The right and the Dems who pee their pants at Glenn Beck’s command hate ACORN for that they do right, and for who they are, and what they aim to do, not for what they do wrong.
MikeJ
Works just as well if you stop there.
Ambergris
Here’s my definition for “Burkean Bells”: Wasted intellectual energy to turn a conservative temperament into a coherent Conservative ideology.
MK
@kay:
This is probably a daft question (I blame my lack of sleep as my excuse) but what do you mean? They make it incredibly complicated? What do you think the normal flow should be at the polls?
FormerSwingVoter
@Brick Oven Bill:
Dear Tenthers: The Commerce Clause and the Taxing and Spending Clause are in the Constitution. In this specific case, selling things in multiple states is interstate commerce – so yeah, the Constitution does, in fact, delegate that power to the United States.
Ash Can
@Makewi: LOL! OK, kiddo, you got me fair and square. I honestly didn’t think you were a spoof. I went for it hook, line, and sinker. Now I know better. Carry on.
SpotWeld
@Makewi is a spoof? Really?
With B.O.B. around my calbration for this sort of thing is way out of wack
catclub
Should I make a donation to ACORN to counter losses from government
cutoffs? Should I have been making donations to them already?
Should there be something like ACT Blue for them?
Or are they too small to bother with?
I assume they are a tax deductible non-profit.
Socraticsilence
Nice dodge by the Wapo Employee- on the question about what happens when the one guy definitely fired turns out to have been playing along in order to go to the cops- with a police record to back up his account.
DougJ
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, pimps and hos = sex and crime, which Americans are fascinated with.
Well, we at least partly agree then.
I still have yet to hear of a scandal involving ACORN that seems that serious to me. And, to keep things on bipartisan tip, I mean serious relative to the three things I mentioned at the top.
licensed to kill time
@kay:
Kay, you are right that this is a cumulative effort, a chipping away at the base of Obama’s legitimacy to be President. It’s like a bunch of Lilliputians with their tiny ropes and stakes trying to pin Gulliver to the ground. Unfortunately the media, with their love of controversy and he said – she said “reporting” inflate the importance of these contrived “issues” and distract from the real problems facing this country.
This reminds me too much of the absolute insanity of the Clinton years, all that time and money wasted on his personal pecadillos. I once made a wingnut neighbor walk out of a dinner party when I said that just once I would like a Republican to admit that all the FUD they tossed around then just might have distracted Clinton from the real threat of bin Laden and his plans (this was not long after 9/11) – nice going there, thanks a lot.
Luckily, Obama seems less distracted by all the RW noise.
kay
@MK:
Here’s an example. I live in a small town, and I’m a lawyer. The “lawyer” is only important in that I can read a statute. There’s a way to do that. It’s logical, and it begins with definitions.
When my (conservative) state legislature instituted ID requirements, the Sec of State issued a flurry of orders to poll workers, all of them conflicting and confusing.
I tend to go to “access” over “refusal”, so, for example, I read the definition of “state-issued document” to include an automobile registration (I was right, by that way, it’s now officially included).
That made sense, because some voters had not brought ID, because they weren’t aware of the new rule, but they drove there, and the registration is in the car. It’s complicated, but there’s also a “poll book”, so the ID is the second safeguard.
I had battles like this all day. Conservatives took the statutory definition and read it so ridiculously narrowly that it excluded a lot of people. They were turning people away who had married, and had a new last name on their license, same address. They were turning away “address mismatches”, and that isn’t even in the statute at all.
It was crazy-making.
There is nothing like being told you cannot vote. Remember, this process is public. You’re pulled out of line. They had no regard, at all, for the voter. I felt as if they started with “no” and challenged the voter to prove “yes” and that’s backward.
I quit poll work after the 2008 primary. It’s too hard, and I lose money when I do it.
MK
@Makewi:
The Interior Department scandal has a decent amount of sex and crime and that’s also getting a lot of play in the press, right? Right?
General Winfield Stuck
@Ash Can:
I suspect it’s just link fail,
tomvox1
What the Holy Hell does this mean???:
Cumberland, MD: Why was the mainstream press so slow to deal with the criminality of ACORN? This failure to deal with the Acorn story is why the mainstream media is not trusted anymore.
Carol Leonnig: Dear Cumberland MD:
So glad you asked this question. I have to agree with our executive editor when he said the other day that he is concerned that reporters sometimes tend to have more liberal sources than conservative ones. This could be part of the problem, but it also strikes me as a fairly natural imbalance that can happen when reporters focused on Washington have been covering a Republican administration for eight years, and trying to learn for the reading public whether they are doing a good job.
Why would “reporters focused on Washington…covering a Republican administration for eight years” have “more liberal sources than conservative ones” I just can’t follow Carol Leonnig’s logic here at all…
Nellcote
@kay:
It started when voting rights laws were passed in the ’60s.
General Winfield Stuck
@tomvox1:
There is no logic, Carol is just doing penance for spanking the might yelephant a little too hard and giving Fred Hiatt a case of vapors.
dr. bloor
Somewhere out there, Katie Graham is begging John Mitchell to run her tits through a ringer to distract her from the shitstain her paper has become.
joe from Lowell
No, no, that’s their second-biggest crime.
Their biggest crime is that they register a lot of black people to vote.
If they were running supermarket, the Republicans would care how many black people they employ.
Origuy
@jibeaux: Yeah, I missed the thread that led to “We Are All Mayans Now”. Does it have something to do with calendars? Pyramids? Jungles? Bloodletting to appease the gods?
While I’m being meta, when do DougJ and Anne Laurie get the blogs they read listed on the blogroll? Oh, and someone needs to list No More Mister Nice Blog. Aimai’s posts are consistently gems.
Napoleon
@General Winfield Stuck:
What did Carol do?
Legalize
Fail.
IndyLib
@Origuy:
It’s a reference to the end of the world coming in 2012 in accordance with the Mayan calendar. If I remember correctly, which I may not, it was coined in a DougJ post about another giant clusterfuck coming down the pike when the commercial real estate market crashes in a similar way to housing.
I don’t have the patience to archive dive, but I think it was sometime in August.
General Winfield Stuck
@Napoleon:
She assigned the words Blacks and Hispanics to a statement O’Keefe the pimp/spy made that part of his reasons for doing the Acorn taping thing was that they registered voters. Apparently, he didn’t assign racial labels to it, but everyone knows what he was talking about. The Post ran an apology for that a day or two ago.
licensed to kill time
Here’s an interesting piece on Health Care, Race and Political Polarization
handy
@Legalize:
I was actually going to snark respond with a “Whatayamean, fail, doesn’t everybody know menthol tastes great and has a wonderful aromatic quality.” But then I went to teh googley and learned via Wikipedia that, among other things methol is used for:
Makewi
@DougJ:
I’m just speculating on why the press gives this one more play, which seemed to be what you were thinking about. I think my reasoning is fairly solid on all 3 points, and as per the usual here many are reading it as if I am endorsing the position. Whether those scandals were “real” or not is actually a separate issue in the discussion of why the press is pumping this puppy.
The 4th estate is a nice ideal, but the reality has rarely ever lived up to the purported purpose and the overriding reality today is that it make money, which has become an increasing struggle.
handy
Oh my, that did not come out right. WP no like UL tags apparently.
Makewi
@Ash Can:
I’m not sure I follow. You asked for the long history of scandal, and I provided links. You don’t have to agree with it, you just have to understand that the idea isn’t coming out of thin air.
scav
Damn Damn Damn Damn. via TMP AP source: Census worker hanged with ‘fed’ on body I’m now officially not having fun. Yes, developing, but damn damn damn damn.
gwangung
Try reading the links for comprehension.
I’m concerned over this backsliding; you were doing so well, eschewing kneejerk talking points and actually thinking about the points you made. But, sadly, you’re drifting backing into “Fuck off, Makewi!” territory.
Makewi
@gwangung:
Be more specific. In what way did the links not live up to what you were expecting?
General Winfield Stuck
@Makewi:
Sweet Jaysus dumbass.. the link to PJ media, accuses ACORN of having a conviction of 12 employees for “Voter Fraud” and the link provided goes nowhere. Do you know the difference between voter fraud and voter registration fraud, and in this case to increase their workers quota’s for pay by registering Mickey Mouse et al…/
You soil this blog with the bogus links and bullshit.
Tom
@ scav
Meanwhile…
Eric Cantor: Pelosi’s living “in another world” if she’s worried about violence
jeffreyw
@Tom:
Looks like that other world includes Kentucky
handy
@General Winfield Stuck:
Also, gotta love how the top results in his Google search link to the supplied PJ “story,” a Reuters story that simple parrots a press release from a Rick Berman front-group, an editorial crafted by a credit card front-group founded by a Cato guy, and the NY Post.
ACORN scandals not coming out of thin air, youbetcha. Also.
John S.
I think the answer to that question is self-evident.
jl
ACORN is so yesterday. I mean, puulleeeeeze. Ghadafi said in his UN speech today that he was proud of ‘his son’ and ‘Africa’s son’ Obama was president. Wanted him to be president FOREVER.
That is the new scandal. Ironclad proof that Obama will put the US under sharia law.
And was that not a hint that Obama is immortal!?!? Anti-Christ style immortal, who will not die, but be thrown into the bottomless pit of fire at Armageddon !!??!!??
Wake up, sheeples!
!!!???. Also.
General Winfield Stuck
@handy:
That is so cool and ironic. Trolls links to astro turfed glibertarian wingnut org. to prove liberal ACORN group is a fraud. You can’t make this shit up. Well, I guess you can with a credit card and a little belief.
jl
The funny little boxes are exclamation marks.
Now Balloon-Juice does not allow exclamatioin marks?
‘random functionality’ does need to be in that B-J dictionary.
Zifnab
@Tom: By “another world” does he mean “the real world”?
Also, it’s refreshing to see Cantor on the defensive, trying to justify and apologize for the hot heads on his own party. Really, the debate has turned around now that even the Politico is forced to actively run puff pieces for the 23% movement.
Let’s stay on this topic as long as we can. I’d love to hear Eric Cantor defend any other mobs of raucous conservatives hitting the airwaves.
General Winfield Stuck
@jl:
Looks like the fun is over for Ghadafi’s most excellent camping trip.
General Winfield Stuck
testing
The Moar You Know
@scav: I am really hoping that this is not what it almost certainly is. Goddamn.
General Winfield Stuck
sorry for the NY Post link, won’t happen again
jeffreyw
via
jl
The press is slow to cover the ‘criminality’ of ACORN because it is penny-ante stuff, mostly committed by a small minority of their employees. Most of it is putting fake names on voter registration forms that will be thrown out after they are submitted. The crooked employees are nabbed and dealt with as appropriate by law enforcement.
This wingnut sting operation went into a number of ACORN offices and had to cherry pick to get some embarrassing interviews. And it turns out their prize ACORN staffer goon was only playing along and reported the incident to law enforcement later.
Not looking good for the big scandal, right now.
Look, I am not a big fan of ACORN. They do valuable work. But I have long thought that their methods for hiring temporary employees and reimbursement methods allow a few crooked low level people to pull penny ante tricks that do not result in any voting fraud, but that do make ACORN look bad, and allow this kind of bogus scandal mongering. But the idea that ACORN is a criminal organization is absurd.
And, lest we forget, Obama’s only important connection to them was for some work he did in the past representing them as a lawyer. They were one of his clients once. That is all. Lawyers have all sorts of clients. Unless the lawyer has long standing regular client he makes a big living off of, it is not a big deal.
Joel
It’s bullying, plain and simple.
ACORN is a pretty diverse organization that draws from the most downtrodden members of society (i.e. people who can’t defend themselves on the national stage). The right wing noise machine (RWNM) is like the 4th grade bully who wants to kick around the kindergartners. Enter ACORN.
asiangrrlMN
When I smoke (once a month), I suck on an Altoids at the same time. Is that the same thing as a menthol?
@PG: I agree with this. When I actually saw the videos on The Daily Show, I realized that these were low-level people just doing whatever. Stupid as all get-out? Yeah. Worthy of such an investigation? No. Especially if what Cole said about the whistle-blower is true.
I bet ACORN wishes they had a tenth of the power the nutters on the right think they have (much like teh gayz would love to be so powerful).
This is such fucking bullshit, I can barely refrain myself from punching the next asshat I see (probably my eighty-something year old die-hard nutter neighbor with Parkinson’s) in the neck.
We’re supposed to ‘walk on by’ war crimes, but swoon on our fainting couches over this? Fuck. that. shit.
Makewi
@General Winfield Stuck:
So you don’t agree with the scandal, actually being a scandal, that doesn’t mean the press, on whom the discussion centers, agrees. Why not try arguing against what I’m saying instead of your fevered imaginations of what you think I really mean. Dumbass.
General Winfield Stuck
@jeffreyw:
Great catch Jeffrey. From my old home state no less. And so it begins.
General Winfield Stuck
@Makewi:
You’re babbling again Scarlett. Slow down and take deep breaths. Whether it’s a scandal or not is subjective, your links and bullshit is the subject of my scorn. You just aren’t up to it is all, and I do hate to see someone make an arse out of themselves daily, even a wingnut, Well, some wingnuts.
gwangung
@Makewi: No, Makewi, the dumbass is the dim bulb who confuses registration fraud with voting fraud, and futher doesn’t realize that this is a function of ACORN working under the constraints of local law, and that these were discovered by ACORN’s own checks and balances. Futhermore, most of these acts are inevitable, given society’s decision to err on the side of leniency and to impose as few constraints on voting as possible, to encourage participation. Or would you prefer that we bar eligible voters in the name of “preventing fraud”?
I’d check that knee out if I were you; it’s getting tendinitis from multiple jerking.
jl
As for instance, in that and so forth:
Illegal and unconstitutional voter suppression efforts targeted at minorities by state and local governments that can effect elections and are voter fraud of some kind are no big deal.
Like, just happening to have some police chekponts for some bogus reason in a minority neighborhood on election day. Or, bogus voter roll purges using maliciously negligently bad data bases just a few months before an election.
No, those are not big deals.
But if some temporary ACORN worker makes a few dishonest bucks by scrawling Donald Trump, or Daffy Duck on some voter regristration forms that will be thrown out as soon as the registars’ office looks at them, well that obviously makes ACORN a danger to the republic and a criminal organization.
Basically, it is a smear, and one that is tied into what I think is significant amount of residual racism involved in the whole wingnut campaign to delegitimatize Obama. I did not like the campaign to delegitimatize Bush after the fishy 2000 Supreme Court election, and I did not like Dub at all. The current effort to delegitimatize our government is much worse.
Dude, election over and settled. Period, and there is no legal basis for challenging it. If you say the system stinks, fine, go change the system. But it is what it is.
kay
I harp on this incessantly, but there’s a broader context, and it’s “access vs fraud” and it’s a long-running battle between liberals and conservatives.
Just look at the US Attorney scandal, or the voter ID restrictions at the state level in Ohio, Indiana, and (most egregiously) Georgia. Those restrictions all came about in the last ten years, and they were enacted at the state level, by conservative statehouses.
What happened? Was massive voter fraud discovered? Well, no. So why were these restrictions suddenly necessary?
They’re a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
It was a “movement” on the Right, and it’s huge.
I personally think it goes deep, and we’ll never bridge the divide.
It has to do with basic ideas about rights, and burdens.
You can reliably split a room into liberals and conservatives when you go to attitudes about voter access versus voter fraud, and then duck, because people will soon be throwing chairs.
I think it’s a more reliable indicator than, say, attitudes abut abortion. That’s been my experience, anyway.
jl
Brick Oven is either a major league brilliant troll, or a brilliant satirist, I cannot tell which.
Other trolls should watch out when Brick Oven is around. One way or the other, they end up looking bad.
In fact, Brick Oven has wone me over on the racism issue.
My friends, the Obama administration will send us into a national nightmare of double reverse criss cross racism that will tear the nation apart.
It is not obvious to me, merely from the menthol cigarette scandal, that the white half of Obama will destry the nation with racist policies against blacks.
And the black half of Obama will destroy the nation with black racism against the whites.
And the remaining heathens and pagans will take over. And note that that I am including Hispanics for Fear of Brown People fear mongering reasons, which according to my wingnut regulation book I have handy, exempt it anti-Catholicism.
Makewi
@gwangung:
Once again, for the perpetually slow in this thread, I am making no claims to the actual veracity of any of the claims involving ACORN. So trying to point out that you disagree with a particular detail in one of the links I provided quite misses the point. Try to stay focused.
Does a scandal have to be verified for the press to consider it a scandal? Srsly ppl.
Zifnab
@Makewi:
You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth again, Makewi. That’s a neat trick.
ironranger
@jeffreyw:
Michelle Bachmann better be on her knees praying for her soul tonight.
General Winfield Stuck
You fucking smarmy weasel. Go away.
Makewi
I don’t know who you folks think you are arguing with, but it surely isn’t me.
@Zifnab:
How so? Did you even read my first comment? Did you read Dougj’s post?
On a related note, did you hear that the IRS severed ties with ACORN today? You all may not buy into the idea that this organization is scandal-ridden, but the press and now the census, irs, house and senate all sure seem to.
jl
@Makewi: There are a lot of scandal ridden organizations in the US. ACORN may be one of them, and if it is, that is the way the cookie crumbles. They will join the ranks of many rich and powerful organizations and businesses in the US.
The point ithat I made was that any scandals in ACORN regarding voting or voter registration fraud are small time frauds that are attempts to cage extra pay from ACORN by temporary workers and low level employees, do not threaten the integrity of the US election process, and to not justify the smears made against them by extreme conservatives and more respectable organizations who promote their claims.
Wile E. Quixote
@Brick Oven Bill
Cool, does this mean that we’re going to be giving the Louisiana Purchase back to the French, the Gadsden purchase back to Mexico, Alaska back to the Russians and ending the War on Some Drugs? I mean I’ve read the Constitution and if we apply your reasoning all of these are prima facie un-constitutional acts.
PaulB
Well, that’s mostly because a) you’re incoherent, and b) you’re making shit up. That tends to affect the quality of the discussion.
Not to mention that you keep bringing up manufactured “scandals,” exactly similar to the current “scandal,” as “evidence” that ACORN is “scandal-ridden,” thus, in fact, proving *our* point, not your own.
That lying propaganda is occasionally effective does not make it any less lying propaganda.
Tim
“The various back-door deals the Obama administration cut with special interests on health care. ”
This is starting to really irritate me. Not the ‘scandal’ but the fact that anyone thinks that it is. The Baucus bill is up to $900m right now and it would be $1.1 to $1.2 Trillion without those back room deals OR significantly more people would be left out without subsidies for insurance or the subsidies would be far less generous.
It’s a crappy deal, but a necessary one.