UPDATE 09/24/09
via ACORN Sues Makers of Pimp and Prostitute Video
BALTIMORE — Community activist group ACORN is suing the makers of a hidden-camera video that showed employees of its Baltimore office giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman posing as a prostitute.
The liberal group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.
The two employees seen in the video were fired after it was posted online. The lawsuit says the employees, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams, suffered “extreme emotional distress.”
The multimillion-dollar lawsuit seeks damages from James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the pimp and prostitute in the videos, and from conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart, who posted the videos on his Web site.
This is very good news. The vicitms of the fraud are fighting back and I am very happy about that. It’s high time that the right-wing radical estreminsts, who illegally and purposefully attemped to create a gothcha moment that was driven by ideology, are taught a lesson in manners. Maryland requires two party consent to create sound recordings. That is the reason that the former ACORN employees will win the suit.
PS: To say that ACORN is a liberal group is not entirely true. They are an organization of families who help the poor no matter their political affiliation.
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Media Matters for America wrote:
Media Matters: Fox News’ incomplete, misleading ACORN coverage is just nuts
From: Media Matters for America [action@mediamatters.org]
Sent: Saturday, September 19, 2009 3:13 AM
To: tom
Subject: Media Matters: Fox News’ incomplete, misleading ACORN coverage is just nutsIf you get your news from right-wing talk radio and Fox News, you probably think America is being overrun by a hyper-corrupt organized prostitution ring headquartered in the White House.
In case you missed this story: Two conservative activists, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, visited a host of ACORN offices around the country posing as a pimp and prostitute. They asked for help establishing a brothel, and even stated that underage girls would be working for them. They had a surveillance camera and recorded at least four interactions with ACORN employees and claimed these employees provided them with assistance. All of the employees implicated have now been fired, and federal aid to ACORN has been cut off.
ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis
What is really embarrasing is that the Senate jumped in with both feet firmly planted on the side of Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe without a minute of investigation into the story. First the Senate and now the House, voted to stop any federal funding of ACORN due to these illegaly gained video tapes that show ACORN employees speaking with these two imposters. O’Keefe and Giles deliberately made apppointments with unsuspecting secretaries and front people in order to secretly grab a “gotcha” peice of damning video. The two imposters then handed the videos of the interviews over to FOX News and then the crap hit the fan.
It was just the beginning. “Obama is Van Jones, Obama is ACORN,” right-wing pundit Monica Crowley said on Wednesday. “Just as he is ACORN, just as he is Van Jones, he is racism,” Rush Limbaugh parroted the sentiment on Thursday. Radio host Jim Quinn said that we were all living in the “United States of ACORN,” and Fox News’ Megyn Kelly had Karl Rove on to talk about the tapes exposing what was now a “remarkable criminal enterprise.” The stakes couldn’t be higher. ACORN, after all, was on tap to receive “eight and a half trillion dollars of stimulus money,” according to Sean Hannity — a number that was a thousand times greater than the equally fictitious billions that Beck had accorded to the organization on behalf of the government. ACORN had suddenly ballooned from an organization which had received $53 million in federal funds over 15 years to representing 67 percent of America’s gross domestic product.
Fox was running so wild with the story that they were willing to lower their already dubious standards. The first problem was one of logic. Four videos were being promoted as unimpeachable proof that all of ACORN is equally corrupt — all 1,200 chapters and hundreds of ACORN employees. It was the opposite of how a credible investigation is supposed to function, in which conclusions are withheld until after all the facts are in. By comparison, here, the conservative media had a few isolated facts but were willing to extrapolate an entire thesis from them.
What the congress and the media failed to do was to consider that ACORN immeditaly fired the employees who gave these imposters advice and took quick action to remedy any more unprofessional behavior of their own frontdesk personnel.
CEO Bertha Lewis said, “We have all been deeply disturbed by what we’ve seen in some of these videos. I must say, on behalf of ACORN’s Board and our Advisory Council, that we will go to whatever lengths necessary to reestablish the public trust. For nearly forty years, ACORN has given voice to communities, and gotten results. Right now, our nearly 500,000 member are working their hearts out for quality, affordable healthcare for every American and to help stop the foreclosure crisis. We must get this process right, so the good work can go forward.”
Once FOX began airing the illicitly gained videos, the Senate, led by long-time ACORN hater Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE), almost immediately voted to withold all federal funds from ACORN without consideration of mitigating circumstances. The Senate did not consider that these two, Giles and O’Keefe, had actually been thrown out of ACORN’s offices and in one office the front desk person called the police when the actors mentioned underaged girls. What the Senate, in their fury of hate failed to do was to give ACORN, an organization that has helped millions of people, the chance to police their own employees – a courtesy even Wall Street has been given in the past.
Instead of investigating these right-wing radical “journalists”, congress is now considering investigating ACORN instead, in support of FOX News’s whacky assumptions that all of ACORN’s 1200 offices around the US is somehow equally guilty.
Since this incedent, ACORN has taken corrective measures by firing those employees invlolved outright, and instituting a rigorous training program for its front office personnel. ACORN’s CEO, Bertha Lewis, has also begun an independant internal investigation.
“As a result of the indefensible action of a handful of our employees, I am, in consultation with ACORN’s Executive Committee, immediately ordering a halt to any new intakes into ACORN’s service programs until completion of an independent review. I have also communicated with ACORN’s independent Advisory Council, and they will assist ACORN in naming an independent auditor and investigator to conduct a thorough review of all of the organizations relevant systems and processes. That reviewer, to be named within 48 hours, will make recommendations directly to me and to the full ACORN Board. We enter this process with a commitment that all recommendations will be implemented.”
There are other mitigating circumstance that Congress and the main stream media has failed to take into consideration. There is another posting on this blog regarding Tresa Kaelke. Media Matters details how FOX, and Congress, got it wrong:
More important, Fox News failed to vet the tapes. This was made painfully clear with the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the fourth video to be released. In the footage, ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke claimed that she had murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse. On September 15, Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Kaelke’s assertion. Beck, who had reported on the supposed confession during his radio program, added on Fox, “She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead.” Later that night, Hannity played the same clip, and in a rare moment of intellectual curiosity, asked about the veracity of the murder claim. “We’re working on it,” Giles said, which was enough for Hannity. The following morning, on September 16, Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, “She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group.”
But Kaelke’s ex-husbands are alive. The San Bernardino Police Department confirmed this simple fact on September 15, releasing a statement that read: “Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.” (Kaelke was soon quoted in an ACORN press release saying that she had made the claim because she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of.) In spite of these developments, the next day, Hannity was still treating the San Bernardino tape as fully credible. He even hosted Giles again but failed to ask her about her own investigation into the truth of the claim. (Here’s a full timeline of the attention the San Bernardino video received.)
Here’s the dangerous part of this smear against ACORN; if you shut them down, you do harm to many Americans suffering from abject poverty from the Mississippi delta to the mountains of Kentucky to America’s inner cities. ACORN is made up of over 400,000 member families and is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low income families. A coordinated attack on ACORN is a coordinated attack on the poor.
The tragedy in this is not the lack of discreation by ACORN employees although they are gulty of violating ACORN’s rules and were fired for it. The real tragedy here is that ACORN is plainly a victim of radical right bloggers, scam artists, and an entire News network that propels a rabid hatred of the poor and supporters of the poor, and has the full support of the Republican Party.
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A Second Look | Congress Targets Acorn, Then Overshoots, While Ignoring Worse Behavior
via Whoops: Anti-ACORN Bill Ropes In Defense Contractors, Others Charged With Fraud
This “ broad brushing” of the wording of the law oftentimes makes Congress look foolish but not in this case. This time they unwittingly did the right thing. All those employees and contractors need to be regulated. And sometimes I think that the military-industrial complex could use some defunding.
There are other, however, much more egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse than a handful of employees giving advice to a pimp that led to the firing of the ACORN employees . Several defense contractors have been in the news lately.
The defense contractor hired to guard the State Department facility in Kabul, Afghanistan, was exposed recently committing sexual deviancy not seen since the days of Caligula. They claim that the photos were of some kind of “hazing”:
POGO wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton detailing the Lord of the Flies atmosphere surrounding the contractor guarding the embassy. The hazing behavior included eating potato chips from one another’s butt cheeks, drinking beverages from the butt cheeks, and pissing on one another.
The point here is that the legislation directed to hammer one organization may have been written so broadly as to include all contractors, referencing the linked article above. If that is the case then Armor Group should be defunded right along with ACORN. Right?
And what about the defense contractor DynCorp? The were busted running a prostitution ring in Bosnia. This next blockquote is from a Jason Linkus article titled, The Unintended Consequences Of The “Defund ACORN” Act, today in Huffington Post. Got there and read it. There are more examples of Congress’ inaction:
Zero consequences! You would think that the Republicans in Congress would be screaming, what with all those “values” they claim! Yet, let a community organization that helps hundreds of thousands of our nation’s poor get jobs and find housing have a handful of employees make procedural mistakes and Congress goes off the deep end – Democrats included.
What has happened to our sense of fairness in America? What has become of our historically acute sense of right from wrong? It has been buried by an ideological fight for the hearts and minds of the voters, by a war on our sensibilities that is meant to confuse us. People can walk the street now toting guns and waving signs that portray our president as a Nazi, signaling to all our younger folks that this is the new “right thing to do” when just a few years ago these whack-jobs would have been swept away by the police. Fairness and politeness no longer exists in the US. The notion of “what’s right is right” has been twisted to the point of confrontation and threats of violence. The things that have made America great in the past, like equal justice for all, is now drowned by something else – talk and spin.