James O'Keefe: Continuing the GOP tradition of law-breaking

In a cruel twist of fate for the tea party/ACORN conspiracy-pushing crowd, one of their fearless young activists, James O'Keefe, was arrested today for attempting to wiretap the New Orleans office of Sen. Landrieu.

You may remember O'Keefe as the pimp in those infamous and heavily edited ACORN sting videos from last summer. If you can remember even further back, he was involved with Lila Rose in undercover operations against Planned Parenthood offices. He called several Planned Parenthood operations and requested to donate money with the stipulation that it be set aside for abortions of black babies (BTW - the Planned Parenthood employee actually obliged).

Needless to say, Mr. O'Keefe has a fetish for role playing and, alas, it looks like he's played one too many games of dress up. While committing a federal crime against an elected official, he was dressed as a telephone repairman who had arrived to, ahem, "fix the phones." Damn, I love double entendres.

So now this masked, neo-con crusader might want to start preparing for his new, all-too-real role of federal prisoner. He's looking at a 10-year sentence and a $250,000 fine.

Luckily for him, he's connected. Aside from countless adoring fans in the conservative community, the father of one of his co-conspirators is a US Attorney.

So what does O'Keefe, the self-proclaimed "godfather of the conservative movement" at his college, have to say for himself?

O'Keefe said only "veritas," Latin for truth, as he left jail Tuesday with suspects Stan Dai and Joseph Basel, both 24. All declined to comment.

As he got into a cab outside the jail, O'Keefe said, "The truth shall set me free."

"Truth" must a code word for connections and outrage from conservatives over what they will undoubtedly describe as "political persecution."

Note to whoever handles this case: take off the kid gloves.

This isn't the O'Keefe's first foray in legal trouble. He's facing a lawsuit brought by an ACORN employee for filming her without consent (the location where they filmed her has a law against this). So you would think that this guy would speculate about possible legal consequences before he wiretapped a senator. Which leads me to conclude that he either A.) wanted to be arrested via some controverted civil-rights/Vietnam era strategy - hence the "truth shall set me free" crap, B.) this guy is just another privileged, arrogant, 20-something idiot, or C.) he's been possessed by the ghost of this guy:

Take your pick. Personally, I'm rooting for C.

Report on ACORN uncovers nothing

This according to the New York Times

A new report on the community group Acorn by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has found no evidence of fraudulent voting or of violations of federal financing rules by the group in the past five years.

There is also this little juicy tidbit:

The report also stated that two conservative activists might have broken privacy laws in California and Maryland by posing as a prostitute and pimp while secretly videotaping Acorn staff members who gave them advice on evading taxes and hiding their activities. The two states “appear to ban” the recording of face-to-face conversations without the consent of all participants, the report said.

You realize what would happen if Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe (the prostitute and pimp, respectively) were to be charged, right? The right would be up in arms. I'm predicting that charges will NOT be filed. You would think, though, that Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe would have checked into privacy laws before they pulled off their stunt.

Though there are inevitably those who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the report:

Acorn hailed the report in a statement, but Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa and one of the most vocal critics of Acorn in the House, said he found the report unconvincing.

“This report doesn’t begin to cover the transgressions of Acorn,” Mr. King said. “I think Acorn is bigger than Watergate.”

Bigger than Watergate?! People, abandon all hope of EVER convincing the right of ANYTHING. For an ideology supposedly based on "common sense" and "reason," this is absolutely delusional.

Church sign in Murfreesboro, TN calls Obama a "nut"?

From the Tennessean:

Bellwood Baptist Church pastor James Avaritt has never been one to mince words from the pulpit. The Murfreesboro minister is also turning a few heads with words on the Middle Tennessee Boulevard church sign: "ACORN, not the only nut in D.C."

WOW. So... just a one time thing right? This doesn't happen on a regular basis? Wrong. A Murfreesboro local had this to say:

"And that wasn't the first sign up there that was offensive," she said. "One had something to do with socialism and health care and another said something about a czar."

This sort of stuff doesn't surprise me. I actually think it happens quite regularly, or at least more than most people would suspect. Congregation members don't usually complain about political messages being posted on church billboards or being pronounced from the pulpit. Largely this is because most of the people in the congregation will agree with the sentiments being expressed.

However, every time a church does something like this, they are putting themselves in danger of breaking federal tax laws:

Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."

Unfortunately churches in middle Tennessee are too often engaging in political messages. Typically this sort of stuff happens in evangelical churches, where the congregation is heavily Republican. You won't be hard pressed to try to find an instance where a candidate has been invited to deliver a special sermon. Perhaps the senior pastor makes an off-hand comment during his own homily. Or maybe some volunteers are distributing "voter guides" after the service.

This past June at Cornerstone Church in Madision, TN - one of those "mega churches" - Pastor Maury Davis gave a lecture series entitled, "Our Civic Duty". In checking Twitter replies to Maury Davis' Twitter account, several seemed to indicate that he had spoken about the liberal assault on Christianity and had made politically explicit comments regarding President Obama. As of right now, Twitter won't let you search for Tweets older than ten days, but once they fix this I'll post some screen shots. In the mean time, here are a couple of screenshots from Maury Davis' own Twitter account:

Davis is no stranger to stirring political controversy, but his congregation is extremely defensive of him and any attempt to expose him is met with a great amount of hostility.

Now, are Pastor Davis and others breaking the IRS tax code? I'm in no place to say. In all likelihood, they aren't. It's hard to prove that a church has broken the law because how exactly are you supposed to define "participating" in a political campaign? Merely expressing political sentiments to your followers doesn't exactly mean that you're advocating the election of or defeat of a certain candidate. There is also evidence that the IRS just doesn't put a lot of effort into investigating alleged infractions. On top of all this you have groups like the Family Reseach Council along with Republican members of Congress putting pressure on the IRS in order to protect churches from having their tax exempt status revoked.

So don't look for any of this activity to stop at some point in the near future. In fact, you can look forward to an increase in covert political activity by churches, because many of them are feeling "persecuted" and just have to speak out. However, I'll save a rant about faux persecution for another blog entry.

Cutting off ACORN funding unconstitutional?

Politico floats the idea:

Article 1, Sections 9 and 10, of the Constitution explicitly prohibit the passage of “bills of attainder”: legislation targeted to benefit or penalize an individual or group, most often by excluding it from government service.

Does the House’s Defund ACORN Act, which passed 345-75 last week, constitute a bill of attainder? The case law on the issue is inconclusive, but it’s provided a glimmer for ACORN’s diminishing cadre of defenders.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties — and one of the 75 Democratic nays — made the case in a floor speech last Thursday, saying the bill was “done in the spirit of the moment, and nobody had the opportunity to point out that this is a flat violation of the Constitution.”

If I remember correctly, the same argument was made against the AIG executive bonuses when Congress tried to come up with a way to take the money back. That effort failed, largely due to it being unconstitutional.

However, I wouldn't expect for this to go anywhere.

The ACORN Fiasco: Giving credit where it's due, and learning from mistakes

So big news on the ACORN front these past two weeks or so. By now you've probably seen the videos or at least head about them on talk radio. To sum it up: James O'Keefe, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, pose as a pimp and a fourteen year old prostitute who are trying to get housing so they can open a brothel filled with underage sex workers from a third world country. Various encounters with ACORN workers were caught on tape. You know what happens next. The ACORN workers actually HELP them get housing and encourage them to falsify forms. They even give them advice on how to claim the underage girls as dependents so they can receive a child tax credit.

Look - these ACORN workers can't be defended. I don't think we're ever really going to know how widespread these sorts of workers were. God only knows how many ACORN offices that O'Keefe and Giles walked into. It might have been 5 offices out of 100 that gave them actionable material. But let's face it, they played hardball against a community organizing group and they won. I admire their tenacity. ACORN has been stripped of it's funding in both the House and Senate, and they are no longer taking part in the 2010 census.

However, these two are hardly the first on the right to employ the "dress-up and hidden camera" act. I think it was over a year ago that Lila Rose posed as a 14 year old and went into a Planned Parenthood outlet with her "30 yr old" boyfriend. Workers at that planned parenthood location, just like they did at the ACORN offices, told Lila Rose to lie about her age so as to not get her "boyfriend" in trouble for statutory rape. Her group, Live Action, has also just made calls to random abortion clinics and pretended to want to donate money with the stipulation that it be set aside for aborting black babies. The worker actually said that could be arranged. [EDIT: Surprise, surprise - O'Keefe was involved in the Lila Rose videos as well.]

I think we need to give the right more credit than we do. They have mastered the art of entrapment. The actions of the ACORN workers aren't worth defending, and neither are those of those select Planned Parenthood employees. There isn't any way you can defend those groups without sounding like you condone law-breaking.

Instead of getting pissed at the likes of James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Lila Rose, lets do something constructive. We need to up our game. Stop giving the right an opening for crap like this. Instead, give them a taste of their own medicine. Show up at their rallies with a video camera and try to incite them into saying something they'll regret later (you know, the sorts of things they say behind closed doors with those of the same demographic background). Call them out on their B.S., and do it the first time they spout the lie. The false rumors about HCR only took hold because they were never denounced forcefully when first encountered. We can't let that keep happening.

If the right wants to play rough, then dammit, we're going to play rough. This is politics.

Side note - to those on the right who are saying that they are simply using the same "Alinsky tactics" that the left has been using for years, I'd like to point out one thing - the vast majority of us haven't read any Alinsky and have no clue what you're referring to. Given the way that Alinsky has been pimped by Glenn Beck, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that conservatives are more familiar with Alinsky than liberals are.

UPDATE: This is the kind of thing that I'm talking about. We need more stuff like this to expose who these people are: