ACORN ... Fighting Back.

ACORN helps low and moderate income and minority citizens apply to register to vote. ACORN works to provide housing and services for lower income families including help with tax preparation, screening for eligibility for federal and state benefit programs, and first time homeowner mortgage counseling and foreclosure prevention assistance. ACORN advocates for the poor, the lame, the less fortunate, the powerless who have historically been locked out as players in our democratic system.

(Side note to the Nabobs: Registration fraud is NOT voter fraud. Voter fraud is when citizens are kept from exercising their constitutional right to vote, or when vote recounts are stopped arbitrarily to favor one party or the other. Voter fraud is when a pseudo-mob storms the recount site and stops the vote from being counted.)

All that, of course, makes it the lethal enemy of the Nattering Nabobs of Negativity, for whom, real fraud (the famous videos in question were created and were shown ILLEGALLY) corporate corruption, and leaders who indulge in prostitution and international "affairs" are solemnly and completely forgiven. Left wing, "liberal goodness on steroids" is the natural enemy of the "One Party, One State" religionists who would rejoice at the fall of the "leftist regime."

My Knuckle Dragging Neanderthal friends who beat themselves with the chains of partisanship, who actively engage in defeating any and all threats from the left, who rejoice at the failures of the President of the United States, who openly cheer when America loses, and who are now lamenting the lack of coverage by the News media might want to stop yelling so loudly.

The videos were fraudulent, misleading, and were taken without consent. The Website owner the first showed them as well as the videographer who took them are now charged in civil court with breaking a Maryland law that requires that both parties of a video taped conversation to consent to it's being shown on the air. The ACORN suit seeks to make public all the video taken by Mr. O'Keefe, including the dozens of meetings from which they were thrown out of the offices as frauds.

Ben Smith at Politico writes, via Kate Harding:

"I'm not sure of the P.R. value of suing without challenging the substance of the videos,"

....but my (Kate Harding's) guess is, the suit itself isn't about PR. It's about holding people accountable for these efforts to play gotcha with national organizations that are the targets of conservative ire, by turning over countless rocks until they find an employee stupid or evil enough to do something unforgivable and/or illegal. Yes, those employees should be rooted out and shitcanned — something ACORN doesn't dispute — but the practice of recording the bad apples in order to, as Schwartz puts it, "destroy an organization whose principal purpose is to help poor people" is pure sleaze. And where it's illegal sleaze, it should be challenged. (emphasis mine)

Yes, lets have some more coverage of this story of "sleaze." Lets hear more about an organization that has been under vicious attacks from the right, simply because it exists and because it serves a constituency that helps preserve the balance in American Democracy.

Yes, lets hear more about FAKE prostitution rings and imaginary issues, but even more light should be shined on the very real stories about prostitution, entrapment, fraud, and corruption accepted as normal strategies used by our Regressive friends to attempt to destroy their political opponents.

Yes, more coverage please!