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Rachel Maddow breaks down who is behind the smears against ACORN and why, and how dishonest the reporting has been by the right wing media on the topic.

MADDOW: It may seem like the only thing happening in Congress these days is the never-ending fight over and of health reform. But if you happen to be watching the House floor at 3:00 this afternoon, this is what you would have seen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. STEVE KING ®, IOWA: Who has consistently called for the clean-

up of the corrupt ACORN, the criminal enterprise ACORN and all of their affiliates? It‘s been people on the Republican side of the aisle that have done that. This is the star of ACORN. He is—he is the lead chief organizer. He is the—he is the person who told the people at ACORN, “I will invite you into the—and we will be setting the agenda for America,” even before he is inaugurated as president of the United States. This is the man who worked for ACORN.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: This is the star of ACORN!

That was paranoid Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa, today, railing against the community organizing group ACORN, and falsely accusing President Obama of being ACORN‘s lead chief organizer. This sort of animus toward ACORN is something that‘s been percolating on the right for a really long time, but it‘s broken open recently as even Democrats in Congress have decided to go along with efforts to defund and demonize ACORN, and some Republican governors have even enthusiastically defunded ACORN as well, despite the fact that those governors didn‘t fund them in the first place.

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Thank God for Joe Conason, who's a consistent champion of the poor and working class. He writes about the trumped-up hysteria about ACORN - and says Republicans who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones:

[...] 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.

If only the Republicans who have worked up a frenzy over ACORN's alleged crimes were so indignant about real and damaging voter fraud -- such as the amazing case of Young Political Majors, the firm that ran GOP registration efforts in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere before the authorities in Orange County, Calif., busted its president, Mark Anthony Jacoby, and sent him to jail last year. He had built a lucrative partisan career by teaching his minions to deceive thousands of voters into registering as Republicans rather than Democrats, among other scams. Of course, the only on-air mention of the Young Political Majors scandal on Fox News was made by blogger Brad Friedman -- and the national media, mainstream and conservative, generally ignored it. They were too busy generating "controversy" over ACORN.

So now the overhyped voting registration tales are metastasizing into wild accusations about ACORN's finances and programs, including claims that the group will receive billions in federal bailout funding and that it is a hotbed of corruption, perhaps even murder. In fact, ACORN affiliates -- those not involved with voter registration -- have received a few million dollars annually in federal funding. The group is not scheduled to receive any bailout money (although working people would probably benefit more from subsidizing ACORN than greasing AIG and Goldman Sachs).

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From Democracy Now--ACORN Head Bertha Lewis Vows Action on Employee Misconduct, But Warns Group Targeted by “Modern-Day McCarthyism”. The Lou Dobbs, Glenn Becks and other right wing screechers of the world should be so proud. We need a few more Amy Goodmans and a few less of them to cut through the propoganda attacking one of the only groups out there advocating for poor people and minorities that don't have much of a voice in our society.

AMY GOODMAN: The anti-poverty group ACORN is coming under a firestorm of criticism after the group’s workers were caught on camera appearing to offer advice to a pimp and prostitute. The video was a major strike for conservatives, who for years have accused ACORN of voter registration fraud during presidential elections. Republicans are calling for a complete cutoff of all federal funding to the group, which helps poor people fight foreclosures, fix tax problems, and register to vote. We speak with ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis.

[....]

AMY GOODMAN: Yet the video came out, and you had some of your biggest supporters in Congress actually voting against ACORN, saying you shouldn’t get funding, because they were appalled by what they saw. How do you put—

BERTHA LEWIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —these two together?

BERTHA LEWIS: Well, first of all, we are suffering from a modern-day type of McCarthyism. You know, have you now or have you ever been associated with ACORN? This has been repeated in the right-wing Republican echo chamber, that somehow or another we are to be discredited.

We are the largest membership-based community organization of low- and moderate-income people of color, black and brown folks, in this country. We have been around for forty years. We’ve saved thousands of homes. We’ve helped raise the wages of tens of thousands and now hundreds of thousands of people. And also, we have been able to make sure that millions of disenfranchised black and brown folks in this country actually vote and they are actually counted.

So, for us, we know that there is a race element to trying to stop us. I mean, look at what’s happened with Van Jones and Eric Holder and Judge Sotomayor. We know that we have been used as a surrogate to attack President Obama. The teabaggers have had signs with ACORN at teabag parties, and we never even were around or there.

And it’s not going to stop. We understand that. And our work is not going to stop. So, the relative ten percent of our entire funding that would come through the government, sure, we are going to fight back against this, because we know that this is an unfair attack. And it’s been going on from the Republican side and the right-wing side. However, our core work will never stop.

And we know that—being the largest organization of black and brown folks, people of color, in this country, we know that we are a target. But we meet that challenge. And if you were to hear the racist, sexist, just horrible vitriol that are visited on our offices and on the phone, in emails, threats left at our door, hate mail letters sent, you know, it is very clear that people on the right, and Republicans in particular, are very upset that ACORN is effective and that it’s been around for forty years and that we are a powerful organization.

Full transcript at Democracy Now.

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It's actually quite rare for Glenn Beck to invite onto his Fox News show a guest he disagrees with. Most often he's playing fanboy to the likes of Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg, which means that the show is usually an hourlong right-wing mutual-admiration society. This means the Glenn Beck show largely is a big Snoozarama, livened up only by Beck's weepy wingnuttery.

But yesterday he invited on Scott Levinson of ACORN, which Beck has been chasing after and demonizing since last summer's campaign. As you can see, the entire exchange turns into a fiasco when Beck refuses to respond to Levinson's points and begins instead showing videos of a Burger King worker bathing in a sink.

At one point, Beck even orders Levinson's mike turned off.

Even more remarkably, after Levinson was off camera, Beck continued to attack him on the camera -- relaying to the audience the argument that ensued afterward (Levinson accused Beck, evidently, of being afraid of black people), calling him a "dirtbag," and then later telling his audience that Levinson had hit up on one of his female assistants in the green room.

Wow.

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Officials in charge of voter registration in Virginia seem to be asking for Federal investigation... According to this press release from this extremely important battleground state, students are being told that they risk losing their scholarship and tax dependency status if they register to vote in their college, as opposed to home, state.    And surprise, it appears all these warnings are bogus and have one impact and one impact only: to suppress voter turnout among college-aged people, who are overwhelmingly supporting Obama this year.   Memo to Virginia: that's illegal. 

InsideHigherEd:

Last week, Virginia’s Montgomery County, home to Virginia Tech, issued a press release regarding proper protocol for college students registering to vote. In interviews with Inside Higher Ed Tuesday, it was described by turns as “unsubstantiated,” “chilling,” and (more generously) as not “incredibly encouraging or friendly.”    Read more...

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