It's too bad ACORN had to suffer at the hands of fools.

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt said in a column published online yesterday that it was "easy to see" why the Times described conservative merry prankster James O'Keefe going into the offices of ACORN "dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risqué high school play" -- after all, "a host" on Fox said that pimp-styling O'Keefe was "dressed exactly in the same outfit he wore to these Acorn offices" and O'Keefe "did not argue."

Now that ACORN faces bankruptcy, O'Keefe faces federal charges in another attempted sting, and Hoyt faces e-mails he attributes to "liberal groups," Hoyt has revisited the situation, reviewed the publicly available material, and far below the fold, concludes that the Times was wrong.

As you know, ACORN is screwed because of this.

Here's what Clark Hoyt says:

Here is what I found: O’Keefe almost certainly did not go into the Acorn offices in the outlandish costume — fur coat, goggle-like sunglasses, walking stick and broad-brimmed hat — in which he appeared at the beginning and end of most of his videos. It is easy to see why The Times and other news organizations got a different impression. At one point, as the videos were being released, O’Keefe wore the get-up on Fox News, and a host said he was “dressed exactly in the same outfit he wore to these Acorn offices.” He did not argue.

But Breitbart told me that, after doing his own examination, “I am under the impression that at no time was he ever dressed as an elaborate pimp” in the offices. Because O’Keefe was apparently carrying the hidden camera, he is generally not visible in the videos, but he is seen briefly entering the Baltimore office wearing a blue shirt and chinos.

I could not reach O’Keefe — who is facing federal criminal charges of tampering with a Democratic senator’s phone in a different attempted sting — or Giles. But I am satisfied that The Times was wrong on this point, and I have been wrong in defending the paper’s phrasing. Editors say they are considering a correction.

The reason the story took off was because O'Keefe dressed up like a pimp and presented himself to FOX and to the world as if that's how he went into ACORN's offices. He doctored the film footage to make it look that way. But, that doesn't change Hoyt's mind on the merits of the story.

Acorn’s supporters appear to hope that the whole story will fall apart over the issue of what O’Keefe wore: if that was wrong, everything else must be wrong. The record does not support them...read on.

Anyway he wants to slice it, the NY Times were made to look fools as did much of the MSM and ACORN suffered for their lack of professionalism. The hoax O'Keefe perpetrated on ACORN caused Congress to cut funding and now they are in financial trouble. Sick bastards like Breitbart rejoice that many ACORN employees will now lose their jobs because of the BUSH economy and this hoax. That's really a shame. But remember, conservatives can do NO wrong.

I believe that Carl Jung was a genius, and since he said the things that people attack are quite often a reflection of the things they despise and fear in themselves, I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps James O'Keefe is simply another self-loathing Republican closet case. I mean, look at his long track record of ridiculing the poor, ethnic minorities and otherwise marginalized groups - his choice of targets might be part of a larger picture.

Yesterday this interesting story ran in the Washington Independent. Could this be part of that picture?

Ben Wetmore, the 28-year-old conservative activist whom James O’Keefe called a “mentor,” has stayed out of the headlines since it was revealed that he housed O’Keefe and the other participants in the bungled sting of Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) office. When I reached Wetmore by phone yesterday, he politely declined to talk about the situation until it settled down.

Still, the Wetmore-O’Keefe friendship was, in gonzo journalism terms, a productive one. In 2008, after O’Keefe had left the Leadership Institute, the two men recorded hidden camera video of themselves going to three state offices in Massachusetts, applying for marriage licenses, openly admitting that they were straight men who wanted to get married to take advantage of the benefits.

In the video, O'Keefe asks his friend if his girlfriend minds them getting married, and he says she doesn't. O'Keefe doesn't mention a girlfriend himself.

Then again, maybe he's just a shy, awkward sort who covers it up with bravado, the kind of socially-handicapped guy who's just trying to fit in any way he can - as evidenced by this picture showing O'Keefe at a performance by his Rutgers glee club at Carnegie Hall.

I guess that makes him a "Gleek" - only without the charm. Or the humanity.

I've been looking for this for days, and finally nailed it down. Yes, alleged felon James O'Keefe is known to make misleading, out-of-context edits in his "documentaries":

Liz Farkas, a Rutgers student who called Mr. O’Keefe “a nice guy and a loyal friend,” said she grew disillusioned after he asked her to help edit the script of a Planned Parenthood sting.

“It was snippets to make the Planned Parenthood nurse look bad,” Ms. Farkas said. “I said: ‘It has no context. You’re just cherry-picking the nurse’s answers.’ He said, ‘Okay’ — and then he just ran it.”

Asked whether the left-leaning documentaries of Michael Moore do not do the same, Ms. Farkas said: “Michael Moore goes after the rich and powerful. James isn’t doing that. He goes after low-level bureaucrats and people who are trying to help low-income people.”

This is going to be interesting, because under discovery, ACORN's attorney will have the right to look into videographer O'Keefe's financial records. Gee, I wonder if anyone else was funding him - and if so, who?

ACORN, the community organizing group embarrassed recently in a video sting, said Wednesday that it needs to determine whether it has major internal problems, but it also struck back, filing a lawsuit against the people who conducted the secret investigation.

Bertha Lewis, head of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, told reporters in a conference call that ACORN does not support criminal activity and that it thinks the filmmakers should have obeyed Maryland laws. In the state, where one video that embarrassed ACORN was made, the act constituted illegal wiretapping, the suit says.

The videos airing in the past two weeks show ACORN housing counselors advising two young conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute on how to conceal their criminal business.

Lewis said she wants a newly hired investigator to find the organization's weak spots, and she said she will make public the findings. Scott Harshbarger, a former Massachusetts attorney general hired for the investigation, vowed a "robust, no-holds-barred" review that would be "transparent." Lewis said ACORN in the meantime will have to turn away many low-income clients it normally helps with threatened foreclosure or tax preparation.

"We want to be sure that before we start helping people with services that our operation is running well," she said. "It doesn't hurt us financially. It does hurt the poor people we have served for many years."

Congress voted last week to ban federal funding for ACORN, and the organization hired Harshbarger to investigate and recommend changes.

On Wednesday, the new head of the federal Census Bureau revealed his reason for dropping ACORN as an agency partner. He said the bureau's link to ACORN was hurting efforts to get Americans to participate in the count. And Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on Wednesday asked the House Judiciary Committee to summon Lewis, ACORN founder Wade Rathke and other ACORN officers for a hearing on its activities.

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There sure was an eruption of interest in domestic terrorism in the media yesterday over that case involving the black Muslim men who wanted to bomb synagogues and planes in the Bronx.

However, you'll notice one key detail here:

A federal law enforcement official described the plot as “aspirational” — meaning that the suspects wanted to do something but had no weapons or explosives — and described the operation as a sting with a cooperator within the group.

“It was fully controlled at all times,” a law enforcement official said.

In other words, these guys had neither the means nor the wherewithal to actually pull off any of these attacks. And an FBI informant helped them take action. We'll see if this case withstands the obvious entrapment defense that the men's attorneys are about 99.9% certain to use.

And that word, "aspirational" -- where have we heard that before? Oh yeah.

That was the word U.S. Attorney Troy Eid of Colorado used when he announced his decision not to pursue the case of the white-supremacist tweakers who were caught trying to kill Barack Obama in Denver. He called their plot "more aspirational than operational".

So you have to wonder how authorities -- not to mention the media, particularly right-wing media like Fox News, and particularly right-wing pundits like Laura Ingraham, who wondered out loud why President Obama didn't mention the Bronx case in his speech yesterday regarding terrorists -- would react if the guys who had been caught yesterday had all been white.

Actually, we know already. They'd have completely ignored the case. Just like the Denver case. And just like dozens of others.

Some others of recent vintage, all of which featured elaborate fantasies of destruction akin to our Bronx bombers' plot, and all of which involved white domestic terrorists, all of which were largely ignored by the media:

-- The skinheads arrested in Tennessee for plotting to kill Obama too. Remember their plan?

According to the ATF, Cowart and Schlesselman planned to suit up in white tuxedoes and top hats and then massacre 88 black people, 14 by decapitation, including Obama among their targets.

-- The Alabama militiamen who plotted to go on an anti-Latino killing rampage:

Continue reading »

TwinCities.com:

A two-day prostitution sting in St. Paul netted 35 men, including a longtime Republican operator in Minnesota politics.

Peter Hong, 41, of Minneapolis, was one of 19 men picked up Wednesday afternoon after police say he responded to an ad for sex put out in newspapers and online by the St. Paul Police Department's vice squad.

The Carleton grad was a campaign spokesman for Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2002 and congressional press secretary to Sen. Rod Grams, R-Minn., for much of the 1990s. He also served as the Bush-Cheney Minnesota campaign spokesman in 2004. His most recent political stint was as presidential campaign spokesman for Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Hong is currently self-employed and "Always Searching for the Next Big Thing!" according to his profile on the business-networking Web site LinkedIn. Read on...

Another loyal Bushie goes down in flames. It appears Mr. Hong has indeed found the next big thing.

CNN:

More than half of Yellowstone National Park's bison herd has died since last fall, forcing the government to suspend its annual slaughter program.

Bison's natural habitat is at high elevations, but they move lower when grass for grazing becomes scarce.

More than 700 of the iconic animals starved or otherwise died on the mountainsides during an unusually harsh winter, and more than 1,600 were shot by hunters or sent to slaughterhouses in a disease-control effort, according to National Park Service figures.

As a result, the park estimates its bison herd has dropped from 4,700 in November to about 2,300 today, prompting the government to halt the culling program early.

"There has never been a slaughter like this of the bison since the 1800s in this country, and it's disgusting," said Mike Mease of the Buffalo Field Campaign, a group seeking to stop the slaughter program for good.

Government officials say the slaughter prevents the spread of the disease brucellosis from the Yellowstone bison to cattle on land near the park. Brucellosis can cause miscarriages, infertility and reduced milk production in domestic cattle. [..]

The USDA acknowledges that bison-to-cattle transmission is difficult to document, but it says investigations indicate that bison were the likely source of infections in cattle herds in Wyoming and North Dakota.

But critics call the culling an overreaction. There is no documented case of the disease passing from bison to cattle, they said.

Let's call this another front on the War On The Environment, shall we? Since their concerted effort to gut the Endangered Species Act last year, which included de-listing the gray wolf in February, resulting in 10 wolves being killed in Wyoming alone this month, the Bush administration has been responsible for causing at least two species (the Lake Sammamish kokanee and the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit) to become extinct. And even more are threatened as they ignore environmentalists. Further, experts are saying the construction of the ridiculous border fence is threatening to make species like jaguars, ocelots, and the Sonoran pronghorn extinct in the United States. Heckuva job, Bushie.

Sen. Larry "I am not gay, I have never been gay" Craig's legal team has opted for a new tactic, given that their initial attempt to have Craig's guilty plea withdrawn was essentially laughed out of court. Now they are opting to try to invoke something that Republicans haven't seemed too concerned about in the last few years: constitutionality.

MN Star-Tribune: Sen. Larry Craig will argue before an appeals court that Minnesota's disorderly conduct law is unconstitutional as it applies to his conviction in a bathroom sex sting, according to a new court filing.

This is the first time Craig's attorneys have raised that issue. However, an earlier friend-of-the-court filing by the American Civil Liberties Union argued that Craig's foot-tapping and hand gesture under a stall divider at the Minneapolis airport are protected by the First Amendment.

Funny thing about that Free Speech argument, you never know who is going to use it...like maybe a man who described a rather crude and fumbling assignation with Craig twenty years ago, culminating in Craig taking out a twenty dollar bill and saying

‘Remember, I can buy and sell your ass ten thousand times over. You were never here. Don't try to come back here. You don't know me.'

Charming to the last, Larry.

(h/t BillW)

Yet another sex scandal--this time, from a DoJ official.** While this was a sting operation and there was no actual victim, the details released in this video make it clear that Atchison has had sexual contact with young children in the past. As a word of caution for those with children, this video contains some graphic details which are not suitable for them.

Download | play Download | play Local coverage from Detroit. (thanks to John K for the video)

Click On Detroit:

A U.S. Justice Department official has been arrested on suspicion of traveling to Detroit over the weekend to have sex with a minor.

John David R. Atchison, 53, an assistant U.S. attorney from the northern district of Florida, was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Detroit Monday afternoon.

An undercover officer posed as a mother offering her child to Atchison for sex, according to police.

According to authorities, Atchison made contact with a detective working undercover for the Macomb County Sheriff's department's.

The detective, acting as the child's mother, allegedly arranged a sexual encounter between Atchison and her 5-year-old daughter, police said. In deposition, detectives said Atchison suggested the mother tell her daughter that "you found her a sweet boyfriend who will bring her presents." Read more...

** Corrected, thanks to all who brought it to our attention.

Via NPR:

Sen. Larry Craig should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea in a sex sting because he was under extreme stress after being hounded by journalists asking questions about his sexuality, his lawyer argues.

Craig, an Idaho Republican, pleaded guilty in August to disorderly conduct following a sting operation in a men's bathroom at the Minneapolis airport. His lawyer, William Martin, said he will file court documents Monday trying to undo that decision so Craig can fight the charge.

Martin said Monday that Craig did not "knowingly and intelligently enter a guilty plea." The senator simply admitted conduct that "itself does not constitute a crime," Martin said. Read more...

Senator Craig's motion to withdraw his guilty plea has been posted online, you can read it here.