Many of these people are “paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests,” writes the magazine’s Sebastian Jones, a freelance reporter after a four-month-long probe.

“Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens—and in some cases hundreds—of appearances,” Jones reports.

For example, Tom Ridge, identified as the former governor of Pennsylvania, appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews urging the White House to “create nuclear power plants.” What viewers were not told, though, is that Ridge since 2005 has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s biggest nuclear power company, Jones writes.

On the same day, last Dec. 4th, retired general Barry McCaffrey, told MSNBC viewers the war in Afghanistan would require a three-to-10-year effort and “a lot of money.” Unmentioned, Jones says, was the fact DynCorp paid McCaffrey $182,309 in 2009 alone and that DynCorp has a five-year, $5.9 billion deal to aid U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Jones describes MSNBC as “the cable network with the most egregious instances of airing guests with conflicts of interest.” He notes, “Only on MSNBC was a prime-time program, Countdown, hosted by public relations operative Richard Wolffe and later by a pharmaceutical company consultant, former Governor Howard Dean, with no mention of the outside work either man was engaged in. And MSNBC has yet to introduce DynCorp’s Barry McCaffrey as anything but a ‘military analyst.’”

Moreover, last January 22nd, MSNBC’s Morning Joe audience saw Mark Penn, identified only as a Clinton administration pollster, suggest the Obama administration put healthcare reform on ice. Unmentioned, says Jones, was “Penn’s role as worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller, which has an entire healthcare division devoted to helping clients like Eli Lilly and Pfizer ‘create and manage perceptions that deliver positive business results.’”

Jones reports that what transpires on MSNBC also occurs on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN and CNBC. These outlets “eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way (and)at times…have even disregrded their own written ethics guidelines.” MSNBC may be the most flagrant example of deception but the other networks do not appear far behind.

During a Sept. 18, 2008, Fox News appearance to discuss Sarah Palin, Bernard Whitman, president of Whitman Insight Strategies—whose clients include marketing/PR firms like Ogilvy & Mather—lambasted Sen. John McCain for proposing to “Let AIG fail,” saying his position demonstrated “just how little he understands the global economy today.” Whitman’s “ongoing work” for AIG was not mentioned!

“When there’s a whole host of pundits on the airwaves touting the same agenda at the same time, you get a cumulative effect that shapes public opinion toward their agenda,” Janine Wedel, an anthropologist at George Mason University told Jones. Another academic, Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, said, “More disclosure is good—I’m certainly in favor of that—but why are these people on at all?”

That’s a very good question. MSNBC, Fox, and the others guilty of deceptive journalism owe their viewers an apology. Such broadcasts are neither fair nor balanced. They are deceptive, slanted, and contrary to the public interest. The cable broadcasters need to pledge to their viewers to reveal the hidden corporate agendas of their guests. Until that time, viewers can always turn them off.

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist who writes on world events. Ross formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

It wasn’t unusual that he mixed a few facts with opinion and outright lies in his three-hour daily show. Fact checking for the man who calls himself “America’s Truth Detector” is as rare as union organizers working for Walmart.

What is unusual is that Rush Limbaugh, whose web site shows a picture of him carrying a large gold-fringed American flag on a six-foot staff, spoke out against the Constitution of the United States.

Because logic and reason avoids his black-clad bouncy body, he may not have even known he was attacking the history of the United States and its Constitution. But on this Friday the 13th, the forces of evil spewed forth from his unfettered microphone mouth.

The United States had announced it was removing five persons accused of plotting the 9/11 terror from Guantanamo Bay and putting them into the federal judiciary system. Attorney General Eric Holder, at a press conference in Washington, D.C., had announced, “After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. . . . I am confident in the ability of our courts to provide these defendants a fair trial just as they have for over 200 years [before] an impartial jury under long established rules and procedures.”

He announced that the Department of Justice would “prosecute these cases vigorously,” and would seek the death penalty in each case. President Obama had said earlier that day he was “absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheik Mohammad [the alleged mastermind behind 9/11, and the other defendants] will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people insist on it, my administration will insist on it.”

Limbaugh called the decision a “disgusting travesty perpetuated here by Barack Obama.” That was just the beginning of his rant. Over the next few minutes, Limbaugh said the decision to bring terrorists to trial was solely “to satisfy the rabid, radical, far left that hates this country; that hates George W. Bush; that hates the U.S. military.”

Limbaugh opposed the use of lawyers; several times he branded them as leftist and Marxist, disregarding the reality that membership in the American Bar Association skews to the right. Although he came from a family of lawyers, he disregarded Constitutional guarantees that require even the most heinous of criminals to be assured their rights, including the right to be represented by an attorney. While erroneously claiming that terrorists have no rights, Limbaugh also objected to providing the defendants “fairness,” because in what he called the “new America,” fairness is something created by “a bunch of radical leftists.” He claimed that the defendants didn’t even deserve lawyers because, in the world of Rush Fairytale Logic, the lawyers would use the courts to attack the United States.

He attacked the federal judiciary, claiming, “There are a bunch of radical leftists on our federal bench,” all of whom apparently, if you believed the Mouth That Roared, are governed by such mundane and useless rules like—well—the Constitution of the United States. What Limbaugh didn’t say, possibly because the facts didn’t agree with his own distorted version of reality, is that there are more conservative judges than liberal judges in the federal judiciary. About one-third of all federal judges were appointed by George W. Bush, with a majority of all judges appointed by Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes.

Limbaugh, in his deliberate distortion of facts also didn’t point out that 62 percent of all appeals court judges were appointed by Republican presidents, and that conservatives are the majority on 10 of the 13 appeals courts. He also failed to point out that six of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents. The Republican-dominated federal courts have cut down several unconstitutional provisions of the PATRIOT Act; the Republican-dominated Supreme Court has twice rebuked the Bush–Cheney Administration for procedures that are blatantly unconstitutional.

In one major decision, conservative Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, speaking for the majority, ruled, “Any process in which the Executive’s factual assertions go wholly unchallenged or are simply presumed correct without any opportunity for the alleged combatant to demonstrate otherwise falls constitutionally short . . . [T]he constitutional limitations safeguarding essential liberties . . . remain vibrant even in times of security concerns.”

Like most conservative radio hosts and their teabag party followers, Limbaugh several times had blasted the Department of Justice for even thinking about bringing the terrorists onto the mainland, claiming the men were so evil that they would endanger all Americans. Unsaid by the talking mouths and empty heads was that the Department of Justice successfully prosecuted numerous gangsters, serial killers, and terrorists, and then successfully imprisoned them without danger to civilians.

For emphasis about how he thought a trial for the 9/11 terrorists would be unfair, Limbaugh threw veiled anti-Semitic attacks upon a possible jury pool. “Before it’s all said and done you’re going to find some whack nut jobs on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that are going to be on this jury,” said Limbaugh. The Upper West Side is largely identified as a community that was settled by refugee Jews, and which still has a significant percent of Jews.

Several times, Limbaugh stated that since the defendants had already “confessed,” the need for a trial was not necessary, and would only embarrass the U.S., placating those “leftists,” and exposing the entirety of the American intelligence community. This, said Limbaugh, is the “hidden agenda” of the Obama Administration. “They want the United States on trial,” Limbaugh cried out. Disregarding the absurdity of his own remarks, Limbaugh never acknowledged that the “confessions” were made only after severe torture. Bringing criminals, who have been subject to torture, to trial, who have confessed, said Limbaugh “is yet another internal assault on the fabric, the traditions, the institutions that have made this country great,” he told his equally rabid listeners.

Having attacked the President, the Attorney General, lawyers, judges, the Department of Justice, and Jews, Limbaugh put Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) into his cross-hairs. Sestak, said Limbaugh, is “a dangerous left-wing radical ideologue.”

What drew Limbaugh’s rage was that Sestak not only supported the prosecution of the 9/11 terrorists in federal court, but that on Fox News, he argued that “Most studies have shown that [torture] does not give you evidence as readily or as credible as other means.” Persons who are tortured, said Sestak, raising concerns about the legitimacy of the terrorists’ “confessions,” will often confess to anything in order to stop the torture.

What Limbaugh didn’t tell his audience was that Sestak was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, a retired vice-admiral who had led a carrier battle group, and was the first director of the Navy’s anti-terrorism unit after 9/11. Sestak’s views are the same as John McCain’s, also a Naval Academy graduate who had led an air squadron.

Listeners could now choose between two war heroes, one of whom had suffered torture as a prisoner of war, and a college drop-out who, said his mother, flunked almost all of his classes in his only year in college, was declared 4-F in the draft, and now hails on 600 radio stations as the mouthpiece for the right-wing fringe.

“We are in the process of destroying American ideals; we are in the process of subordinating America’s greatness, America’s exceptionalism,” Rush Limbaugh wailed.

The reality is that flag-waving fact-impaired Rush Limbaugh has no idea what American ideals are, nor does he have respect for the legal history of the United States or the power of the Constitution.

Walter Brasch is a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His most recent book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He can be reached at brasch@bloomu.edu.

“This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation.…This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

I cite this as precedent in three realms: An African-American defining a lynching beyond the traditional mob beating and hanging of black people; a Supreme Court Justice not known for opinions sympathetic to minorities here asserting racism as the cause in a line of inquiry; and the U.S. Congress’s acceptance of this definition as they hastily approved the minimally experienced Thomas following his scathing complaints.

The history of lynching in America is considerable. From 1882-1968, nearly 5000 lynchings occurred in the United States.  Lynching is vigilantism and extrajudicial decision by a group of people, a violent act by a mob that does not believe their agenda will be met by law, aware they are acting out of the law, but in effect being the law. There is rarely accountability for those involved.  In fact, the display of the victim hanging for all to see is meant to scare off others, violators of perceived segregation or threats to authority.

A perceived wrong to white women was often used as justification. Fueled by prejudice and untruths, urged by a perceived threat or need for immediate justice, lynchings often occurred for reasons other than the alleged crime, like a land or business dispute. Lynchings occurred primarily with blacks men dying at the hands of a white mob, but white people were also targeted, for activism or outspokenness.  

This would seem to be the case in Kentucky, where a white census worker was murdered, left hanged, naked, hands taped together, gagged, his ID taped to him and “FED” scrawled across his chest.  To dispute that this heinous crime qualifies as a lynching is a very dangerous road to go down, even from people who email White House watermelon pictures. Nonetheless, some are inhumanly quick to venture any number of defamatory theories, blaming a victim who can no longer speak for himself, rather than acknowledge what is plain as day.

The manner in which Bill Sparkman was left to be found makes it clear that this was meant as a message. His body didn’t have “Bill” scrawled on it, or “Guy Who Wronged Me Personally In Ways That The Legal Process Will Not Adjudicate Fairly.” No, it said simply, “FED,” as in, what else is there to say?  He was a federal employee—how dare he?  But why on earth would someone want to kill a federal employee (outside of postal-worker-on-postal-worker violence)?  How could population counting of American citizens to allot them equitable representation and public resources make them want to kill you?

Fanatical fear mongers, such as wrist-slasher and Rep. Michelle Bachman, R-Minn., have sought to create fears of this census process that occurs every 10 years, alleging surveillance and plans to build government camps. She has been notably dodging the issue since Sparkman’s murder, but she had plenty of unfounded fears to share about the census just months ago:

As you can see from this clip, ACORN has already been conflated with the right wing paranoia about the census, with Fox’s Megyn Kelly re-enforcing these misperceptions up until Bachmann evokes the Japanese internment camps in World War II as reason for us to be suspicious today. That ACORN is raised as a specter in the same breath as the internment of Japanese-Americans by the U.S. government post-Pearl Harbor reveals the far-flung misimpressions of this community umbrella organization. ACORN sounds like COBRA.

The census worker lynching in Kentucky indicates that this violent fervor is still alive and well, and being fed some of the purest baloney that the right wing fear machine can mass-produce in their all-out efforts at relevance. The only danger presented by both census-taking and ACORN’s voter registration is the counting and empowerment of Brown people. As the population includes more minorities—on their way to becoming the majority—plenty of bigoted white people feel their sense of prestige endangered. Census data goes into districting, and thus proportional representation in government.  More Brown people voting further threatens the status quo.

By the standard of a high-tech lynching, ACORN’s travails are commensurate. The attacks on ACORN have been ongoing, involving the Justice Department, the White House, and the Republican National Committee, well before a couple of privileged white kids in costumes wandered into poor communities across the country hoping to make social workers look stupid and lose their jobs. This is a mob Karl Rove started years ago.

James O’Keefe III is serving Karl Rove, knowingly or unknowingly. His very identification of ACORN as what had to be taken down a notch — not Goldman Sachs, not the Treasury, not U.S. companies with off-shore accounts — why would O’Keefe even know what ACORN is?

This extensive report on the media’s failure to objectively cover ACORN, just released by the Occidental College Urban & Environmental Policy Institute shows the rampant inequity of media coverage and lack of accuracy in reporting on ACORN for the past year. If someone were to see solely this much negative press, they would probably hold an unfavorable view of ACORN as well, as some 67 percent people do, according to a recent poll Karl Rove Tweeted.

Enter James O’Keefe III to take that ball of misinformation and run with it. On Fox & Friends, James O’Keefe III is introduced at the beginning of the interview, wearing a fur coat over his preppy blazer, as he waves a cane. The host is quick to excuse his appearance: “You’re not a pimp, you’re just playing one on our show.”

O’Keefe replies: “I’m one of the whitest guys ever, I just wear ridiculous stuff and put people in ridiculous situations.” That is how he assures us he is not a pimp—he is one of the Whitest Guys Ever, therefore on the opposite end of the spectrum from the Blackest Guys Ever, who normally tend to this kind of thing.

Implicit is this: ‘I am so white, I had to dress up like a pimp caricature to look black, and it actually worked. That they acknowledged me despite my outlandish attire shows that they are so gullible and base, I was mistaken for a real pimp, which they all must know, being minorities. Once disguised in this clownish attire, they spoke to me as one of their own, so therefore this is how they all behave throughout their organization. Had I not been dressed as Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch, the ACORN employees would have known that I was white, and therefore been on their best behavior, as we can expect them to be to us white people when we come around to check on them.’

Just by walking in the door dressed like this, O’Keefe is casting aspersions that people like this would go there (not just sex workers—clueless sex workers). O’Keefe even pleaded with one alarmed ACORN worker to not call the cops for assistance, so that later O’Keefe can fault him for not calling the cops.  As O’Keefe says in the above clip coldly, “That’s who these people are.”

O’Keefe is quick to generalize an entire national organization based on a singular intrusive experience, despite other ACORN offices not taking his bait, after admitting he went in there to prove they were thugs.  If that’s who these people really are, why not release the videotapes in their entirety to show that, including those tapes shot in cities that did not humor O’Keefe, like Los Angeles or Philadelphia, where the ACORN office filed a police report about the pimp and ho spectacle?

As O’Keefe insists in the clip above, ACORN’s allegation that the tapes appear doctored is “a lie,” so he shouldn’t have a problem proving it by releasing the full unedited tapes, which would likely be part of ACORN’s lawsuit against him. Refuting the “moral equivalence,” O’Keefe decries that doctoring tapes does not even compare with child prostitution — suggesting that to O’Keefe, the ends justify the means.  Was this about the truth, or making ACORN look bad?

Lost in all of the sensationalism of O’Keefe’s hyperbole and selective truths was that there has been no other connection between ACORN and underage prostitution, until O’Keefe walked in and started talking about it to any ACORN employee he could get to listen to him.

Try to explain this to the anti-ACORN vandalism that appeared immediately after O’Keefe’s videos, notably at Shepard Fairy’s art studio in Santa Monica.  The stencil reading “ACORN Funded Prostitution Zone” doesn’t take into account that there has been no evidence of actual prostitution, or that Shepard Fairy doesn’t even have any connection to ACORN—but he made a poster for Obama, so they’re all connected?   This is the kind of hasty reaction that ties a bunch of unrelated things together in a mob’s mind, searching for some easy target.

Many in the crankosphere were quick to chest-beat: “To defend ACORN is to defend child prostitution itself.  No one can defend them now!” Actually, you can defend ACORN, and many have, because decades of real work in communities across our country still amounts to more than a fleeting image to a bunch of anonymous people in Gotcha Mode who do not know the reality of what ACORN is and will not bother to learn.

But once again, this is beside the point: Do I have to defend everything that ACORN has or has not done to decry this unjust process? Myself and others have attested to ACORN’s greater good, but there is a critical need to refute gross misrepresentation and be vigilant in truth to rebuff future pitchfork-wavers.

In the wake of the fallout from the Pimp-Ho videos, the first government tie to drop ACORN was the Census Bureau, even though they do not pay ACORN for their service.  Rep. Daniel Issa of Orange County introduced a measure to strip ACORN of all federal funding, which quickly passed with few questions. It passed so quickly, no one realized it could apply to all defense contractors, as it might should.  Now, Democrats are falling over each other trying to score a major win for Republicans and enact a new measure to re-de-fund ACORN, just to be safe.

This is another characteristic of lynching: That it is not just the hate mongers doing it. This was carried out by the community.  James Allen’s Without Sanctuary, a book of postcards from the turn of the 20^th century when lynching photos were like trading cards, includes this observation from Pullitzer Prize-winning historian Leon F. Litwack wrote:

“The photographs stretch our credulity, even numb our minds and senses to the full extent of the horror, but they must be examined if we are to understand how normal men and women could live with, participate in, and defend such atrocities, even reinterpret them so they would not see themselves or be perceived as less than civilized. The men and women who tortured, dismembered, and murdered in this fashion understood perfectly well what they were doing and thought of themselves as perfectly normal human beings. Few had any ethical qualms about their actions. This was not the outburst of crazed men or uncontrolled barbarians but the triumph of a belief system that defined one people as less human than another. For the men and women who comprised these mobs, as for those who remained silent and indifferent or who provided scholarly or scientific explanations, this was the highest idealism in the service of their race. One has only to view the self-satisfied expressions on their faces as they posed beneath black people hanging from a rope or next to the charred remains of a Negro who had been burned to death. What is most disturbing about these scenes is the discovery that the perpetrators of the crimes were ordinary people, not so different from ourselves — merchants, farmers, laborers, machine operators, teachers, doctors, lawyers, policemen, students; they were family men and women, good churchgoing folk who came to believe that keeping black people in their place was nothing less than pest control, a way of combating an epidemic or virus that if not checked would be detrimental to the health and security of the community.”

James Allen himself reflects on the postcards of lynchings as pornographic fodder:

“I believe the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator at lynchings. The photographic art played as significant a role in the ritual as torture or souvenir grabbing — a sort of two-dimensional biblical swine, a receptacle for a collective sinful self. Lust propelled their commercial reproduction and distribution, facilitating the endless replay of anguish. Even dead, the victims were without sanctuary. “

On James O’Keefe III’s Facebook page, one of his many new supporters posted, “Is there some way to outlaw ACORN? And then anyone giving them money would be breaking the law.”

While such strong federal government intervention seems to be counter to the Right’s constant outcry of preventing such intrusion, it does aspire to bend the law to punish those who disagree, and set an example.

In no way am I suggesting that O’Keefe was, or is, consciously promoting racial violence, or even responsible for any that occurs in the wake of his smear job.

But at a lynching a hundred years ago, James O’Keefe III would have been the one taking the picture.

John Wellington Ennis is a filmmaker whose most recent documentary, FREE FOR ALL! was hailed by critic Roger Eberg as “engrossing, even enraging.” His production company Shoot First Inc., in Beverly Hills, specializes in unscripted entertainment, such as documentaries, reality TV, comedy, and live music. He blogs at johnennis.tv.

ACORN has long been one of Karl Rove's targets.

In recent days, the Washington Post, the New York Times and other major news outlets have recounted the “troubled” history of the poor people’s advocacy group ACORN, but left out the five-year anti-ACORN campaign led by White House adviser Karl Rove and other Republican operatives.

Dropped down the memory hole is the fact that ACORN was at the center of the so-called “prosecutor-gate” scandal, when the Bush administration pressured U.S. Attorneys to bring indictments over the grassroots group’s voter-registration drives and then fired some prosecutors who resisted what they viewed as a partisan strategy not supported by solid evidence.

The latest furor over ACORN was touched off by conservative filmmaker James E. O’Keefe III and a right-wing columnist who posed as a couple planning to buy a house for use as a brothel and getting advice from a few ACORN employees, rather than being turned away.

The pair filmed their meetings at ACORN offices with a hidden-camera, producing a video that brought to a fever pitch the long-simmering Republican war against ACORN. The video was trumpeted by Fox News and other right-wing news outlets, starting a stampede in the mainstream press and in Congress, where a majority of panicked Democrats joined the herd in approving legislation to strip ACORN of federal funds.

The stampede, which trampled ACORN and its mostly black and Hispanic organizing staff, soon pulled in President Barack Obama, who often has touted his work as a community organizer in his youth. In an interview last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Obama told host George Stephanopoulos that ACORN “deserves to be investigated.”

Yet, while bending to Republican demands to speak out against a poor people’s group, Obama continued to resist the notion that powerful Republicans from the Bush administration deserved to be investigated for authorizing the use of torture against prisoners in the “war on terror.”

In an interview with CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Obama downplayed the seriousness of an investigation authorized last month by Attorney General Eric Holder into several cases where CIA officers allegedly exceeded Justice Department guidelines during the interrogations.

“I have said consistently that I want to look forward and not backward when it comes to some of the problems that occurred under the previous administration, or when it came to interrogations,” Obama said. “My understanding is it’s not even a criminal investigation at this point.”

Stark Juxtaposition

That juxtaposition is a stark example of how Republicans – aided by the giant megaphone of the right-wing media – continue to keep Democrats on the defensive, while evidence of Republican guilt gets little sustained attention except at a handful of Internet sites.

That pattern holds true even for issues connected to ACORN.

For instance, much less media interest followed the House Judiciary Committee’s August release of Bush administration e-mails related to the role that Rove and other Bush administration officials played in the firings of nine U.S. attorneys amid a Republican effort to target ACORN’s voter- registration work during the 2004 presidential election between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry.

Two of the nine U.S. Attorneys who were fired in 2006 were targeted because they refused to bring criminal charges against individuals affiliated with ACORN. The firing of another U.S. Attorney was due, in large part, to his refusal to convene a grand jury and secure a voter-fraud indictment against individuals, some of who were affiliated with ACORN.

In a May 2, 2005, Rove deputy Scott Jennings sent to another Rove protégé Tim Griffin an e-mail, which said that in the fall of 2004, Bernalillo County’s Republican Sheriff Darren White and Pat Rogers and Mickey Barnett, Republican Party operatives in New Mexico, turned over hundreds of “suspected fraudulent voter registration forms” handled by ACORN workers. The e-mail was also forwarded to Leslie Fahrenkopf, Bush’s associate counsel.

In 2004, New Mexico was considered a swing state in the Bush-Kerry race and Bernalillo County had been targeted by ACORN for a major grassroots effort to register voters, which resulted in about 65,000 newly registered voters, many of who were low-income and minorities who tend to vote for Democrats.

Sheriff White challenged the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls, according to then-New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in his book, In Justice: Inside  the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration. White held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.

“The purported examples that were then produced included a woman who had correctly filled out two different registrations with slightly different signatures and another in which a husband, with his wife’s permission, had signed her name to the form,” Iglesias wrote. “It was demanded that I take action against what was perceived as rampant abuse of the system.”

Scant Evidence

Iglesias said he established an election fraud task force in September 2004 and spent more than two months probing claims of widespread voter fraud in his state. In testimony before a Senate committee in 2007, Iglesias said the task force received about 108 complaints of alleged voter fraud through a hotline over the course of about eight weeks.

“Most of the complaints made to the hotline were clearly not prosecutable – citizens would complain of their yard signs being removed from their property and de minimis matters like that,” Iglesias testified.

“Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote. The law, 42 USC 1973 had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.

“After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution.

“I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the” election fraud task force.

Iglesias said Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes. He wrote in his book that the Justice Department issued a directive to every U.S. Attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, even though evidence was thin or non-existent.

During this period, ACORN had stepped up its voter registration efforts and boasted in press releases about registering tens of thousands of first-time voters.

Iglesias said in late summer 2002 he received an e-mail from the Justice Department suggesting “in no uncertain terms” that U.S. Attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials “to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases.”

Other pressure also came from congressional and state Republicans. In New Mexico, Barnett, Rogers  White were among Republican operatives who complained directly to Rove at the White House and to officials in Bush’s Justice Department that Iglesias would not prosecute ACORN employees. These unhappy Republicans demanded that Iglesias be replaced.

According to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general released last year, “In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to [Craig] Donsanto in the [Justice Department's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, ‘I have calls in, to the USA [U.S. Attorney] and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias’s Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an e-mail, which said, “The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. . . . The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!” [Carpe Diem is translated, “seize the day.”]

Despite positive job reports, Iglesias was fired in December 2006 as part of a purge of nine federal prosecutors who were deemed not “loyal Bushies” or had other supposed shortcomings.

Last August, Rove went on Fox News to downplay his role in Iglesias’s firing, but acknowledged that he did pass on complaints to the Bush Justice Department about “the performance of the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, that he failed to go after ACORN in clear cases of vote fraud…”

Expanded Warfare

But the Republican war against ACORN didn’t stop with Iglesias.

In Missouri, former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was another federal prosecutor who fell into disfavor with the Bush administration because of alleged inaction on ACORN and voter fraud issues.

Graves would not file criminal charges of voter fraud against four employees of ACORN, according to documents later released by the Justice Department in connection with the fired-prosecutors probe.

Graves also resisted pressure from Bradley Schlozman, head of the Bush Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to file a lawsuit against Robin Carnahan, Missouri’s Democratic Secretary of State, on charges that Carnahan failed to take action on cases of voter fraud, Graves testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007.

Graves was forced to resign in March 2006 and was replaced by Schlozman as Missouri’s acting U.S. Attorney. Schlozman then filed the civil suit against Carnahan.

The case was later dismissed by a federal court judge who ruled, “The United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States. Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred.”

Schlozman also filed federal criminal charges of voter registration fraud against members of ACORN five days before the November 2006 mid-term elections. Schlozman came under criticism for breaking with longstanding Justice Department policy against bringing voting related charges so close to an election.

Schlozman testified before a Senate committee in 2007 that he received approval to file the voter registration fraud charges from a Justice Department ethics official. He later changed his testimony, was accused of perjury and was the subject of a federal investigation. The Justice Department, however, recently declined to prosecute Schlozman on allegations that he lied to Congress.

Earlier this year, a Justice Department watchdog investigation concluded that Schlozman broke the law by considering political and ideological affiliations in deciding who can serve in the civil rights division, where Schlozman supervised civil rights and voting rights attorneys from 2003 to 2006.

“My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section,” Schlozman said in a 2003 e-mail. “I too get to work with mold spores, but here in Civil Rights, we call them Voting Section attorneys,” he told a friend. Schlozman said, according to a DOJ watchdog report released in January, that it was his desire to rid the DOJ of the “Democrats” and “liberals” because they were “disloyal” and replace them with “real Americans” and “right-thinking Americans.”

Though the Republican war against ACORN contributed to the “prosecutor-gate” scandal, GOP operatives carried the fight into the 2008 presidential campaign seizing on some ACORN employees who apparently were padding their registration numbers by submitting bogus forms with fake names like “Mickey Mouse.”

For its part, ACORN has insisted that its own quality control flagged many of the suspicious registration forms before they were submitted to state officials and that state laws often require outside registration groups to submit all forms regardless of obvious problems.

Independent studies also have shown that phony registrations rarely result in illegally cast ballots because there are so many other safeguards built into the system.

For instance, from October 2002 to September 2005, a total of 70 people were convicted for federal election related crimes, according to figures compiled by the New York Times last year. Only 18 of those were for ineligible voting.

Exaggerating a Problem

That figure — 70 people — appears in a misleading report released July 23, a little more than a month before the ACORN videos were broadcast on Fox News. The report was prepared by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform.

The report – entitled “Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?” – cited,  among other material, several dozen published reports from right-wing news organizations, including Fox News’ Glenn Beck, and Breitbart.com, whose proprietor, Andrew Breitbart, worked closely with Beck and the filmmakers of the ACORN video, to demonstrate that the organization has engaged in widespread criminal acts related to voter fraud, tax evasion and racketeering.

An in-depth search on Google and Lexis to support Issa’s claims that all 70 people he cited worked specifically for ACORN and were convicted of crimes does not turn up evidence – other than Issa’s claims – which had gone viral and were picked up by right-wing echo chamber of news organizations, talk radio and bloggers.

The actual conviction numbers Issa cites in his report don’t add up to 70 and those cases weren’t all convictions. Additionally, Issa cites employees who were charged or arrested on suspicion of registering bogus names on voter registration cards but it’s unclear whether they were ever convicted.

According to an Oct. 18, 2008, report in FactCheck.org, “Neither ACORN nor its employees have been found guilty of, or even charged with, casting fraudulent votes,” although “several ACORN canvassers have been found guilty of faking registration forms and others are being investigated. But the evidence that has surfaced so far shows they faked forms to get paid for work they didn’t do, not to stuff ballot boxes.

Indeed, the cases suggest that ACORN was the intended victim of the attempted fraud, in that the phony registration forms were part of an effort by employees to exaggerate their work product.

“No evidence has yet surfaced to show that the ACORN employees who submitted fraudulent registration forms intended to pave the way for illegal voting. Rather, they were trying to get paid by ACORN for doing no work. Dan Satterberg, the Republican prosecuting attorney in King County, Wash., where the largest ACORN case to date was prosecuted, said that the indicted ACORN employees were shirking responsibility, not plotting election fraud.”

The FactCheck.org report was prepared after Republican presidential candidate John McCain jumped on the anti-ACORN bandwagon, citing it at the third presidential debate. He declared ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Web Ad

The McCain-Palin campaign put out a web ad titled “ACORN,” which carried the verbal endorsement of McCain.

The ad asked “Who is Barack Obama? A man with ‘a political baptism performed at warp speed.’ Vast ambition. After college, he moved to Chicago. Became a community organizer. There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN. He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

“What did ACORN in Chicago engage in? Bullying banks. Intimidation tactics. Disruption of business. ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans. The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.

“No wonder Obama’s campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, ‘Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN.’ But Obama’s ties to ACORN run long and deep. He taught classes for ACORN. They even endorsed him for President.

“But now ACORN is in trouble.”

The motive of Republicans in escalating the war on ACORN was suggested by a line in Rep. Issa’s report – to delegitimize Obama. On page five, the report states: “Documents provided by former ACORN employees and contained in this report demonstrate the degree to which ACORN and ACORN affiliates organized to elect President Barack Obama in 2008.”

A parallel between today’s ACORN attacks and those during Campaign 2008 is how the major U.S. news media mostly ignored the connections to the “prosecutor-gate” case. Last year, the press focused on anecdotes like Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo’s name showing up on one registration form.

The McCain campaign’s attempt to politicize ACORN – and hype the danger of voter fraud – also paralleled the allegations made by Republicans during the final days of Campaign 2004.

In October 2004, Marc Racicot, chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign, called on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry to demand that ACORN and other voter registration groups stop engaging in voter registration fraud. Racicot said these registration efforts would “ultimately paralyze the effective ability of Americans to be able to vote in the next election.”

Media Campaign

Two weeks before the 2004 presidential election, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett announced the formation of a media campaign to counter what they claimed was voter registration fraud in nine Ohio counties.

“The reports of voter fraud in Ohio are some of the most alarming in the nation,” Gillespie said on Oct. 20, 2004.

In some ways the attacks on ACORN for allegedly signing up phony voters served as a cover for Republican efforts to purge real voters from the voting roles, a tactic that became infamous in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio.

In Florida, another battleground state in the 2004, President Bush’s brother Jeb was governor and the state’s Department of Law launched a statewide probe into voter registration fraud just two weeks before the presidential election. A press release from the Department of Law cited ACORN, which registered more than 212,000 new voters in the state.

In the two weeks before Election 2004, GOP officials raised similar concerns in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

Now, having finally succeeded in dealing a severe blow to ACORN with the undercover videos, Republicans are trying to expand the stain to Obama. In a speech on the House floor on Thursday, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, calle Obama “the star of ACORN, the lead, chief organizer…He walks with them all the way through.”

King then demanded that every House committee launch an investigation into ACORN and criticized as “a lame little announcement” that the Justice Department will look into the group’s activities.

At least two Democratic lawmakers, however, want to find out how the congressional backlash against ACORN will impact the low-income families and individuals the organization assists.

In a two-page letter sent Wednesday to Daniel Mullhollan, director of the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the investigative arm of Congress, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, requested CRS to “research and issue a comprehensive report concerning proposed and pending Congressional and other activity related” to ACORN.

“Because of the recent charges and countercharges that have been leveled at ACORN and various proposals for action, we believe it is important that CRS conduct a careful and objective analysis of a number of issues concerning ACORN,” the letter says.

Specifically, Conyers and Frank want CRS to provide details about the “pending and proposed [civil, criminal, congressional, and internal] investigations” into ACORN as well as requests for probes by lawmakers; details about the federal funds ACORN has received from various government agencies over the past five years; a description “of all instances, if any where ACORN violated the terms of its federal funding”; and the extent to which ACORN has helped place homeless and low-income families into homes.

Additionally, Conyers and Frank want the report to include details about the impact on elections from phony voter registration forms ACORN employees have filled out, and whether the undercover videos taken earlier this year at a few ACORN offices violated federal and state wiretapping laws.

Lastly, CRS was asked to determine whether the “Defund ACORN Act,” an amendment sponsored by Issa, that passed the House last week and other pieces of legislation aimed at specifically stripping ACORN of federal funds is unconstitutional or “would represent an unlawful bill of attainder.”

The claim that the “Defund ACORN Act” represented a bill-of-attainder violation was mentioned by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, last week after the passage of the amendment.

“The Constitution says that Congress shall never pass a Bill of Attainder,” Nadler said during a floor speech after last week’s vote. “Bills of Attainder, no matter what their form, apply either to a named individual or to easily ascertainable members of a group, to inflict punishment. That’s exactly what this amendment does.

“It may be that ACORN is guilty of various infractions, and, if so, it ought to be vetted, or maybe sanctioned, by the appropriate administrative agency or by the judiciary. Congress must not be in the business of punishing individual organizations or people without trial.”

The big news from the United Nations today? According to Fox News, it was Qaddafi praising President Obama as a “son” of Africa.

That the House of Representatives has moved swiftly on anything is stunning in and of itself. More stunning, this is in response to a single independent report by conservative activists, with no follow-up investigation, no hearings, not even being provided a copy of the full, unedited video tapes shot by conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles at a couple of ACORN offices.

This is serious stuff here. This is not a game of gotcha, of cheap political points, of practical jokes — not when this is money that helps in many real ways in impoverished communities around our country.

It is vital to assess how this backlash was accepted so quickly in light of videos that were from someone whose films are funded by conservative backers, videos that misrepresented ACORN through editing and not disclosing other failed attempts at their desired response, and may well have been dubbed over, if O’Keefe would dare to release the unedited tapes in their real context to prove otherwise.

A significant reason that this ACORN backlash has moved through Congress like Montezuma’s Revenge is that this particular hidden camera stunt had the ring of “child prostitution” in it, which most politicians of either party would run from rather than dispute its irrelevance. “Anyone defending ACORN is for child prostitution” is an immediate fallacious meme. It’s not like we’re talking about the Catholic Church here, which still gets federal funding.

Noteworthy is that there have not been any previous allegations between child prostitution and ACORN. In this weekend’s LA Times, O’Keefe himself asserts that this ruse had nothing to do with prostitution, importing underage sex workers, or tax help for starting up a business.

“Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization,” he said. “No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find.”

That’s what this is really about: the elections, and the threat that has been hyped tirelessly that ACORN is in some way stealing your vote.

Before I digress into the long campaign to smear ACORN because of its successful voter registration, I don’t want to be accused to changing the subject to the elections. O’Keefe clearly stated that is what these stunts were about from the beginning.

There is much to dispute in O’Keefe’s quote. There is no evidence whatsoever that politicians are getting elected single-handedly by ACORN, and it is a wild exaggeration. Many claims of voter fraud are made, few instances ever occur.

What has been distorted is that these allegations surround voter registrations, not actual votes, and that ACORN has regularly flagged forms that were incomplete, duplicate, or unverifiable. By law, anyone collecting voter registration forms has to turn in all that are used, even if they know the forms will not be processed.

Far-fetched is the idea that no one in the media has been putting pressure on ACORN. That O’Keefe would even think ACORN could elect politicians single-handedly is because of FOX News’ rampant coverage and conflation of ACORN conspiracies and allegations, to the extent that John McCain worked it into his stump speech by the end of the 2008 Presidential Election.

The red herring of voter fraud as an excuse to deny others the right to vote is a well-worn claim. Voter suppression, specifically using the fear of “voter fraud” to advance voter suppression, is a topic I have explored and documented in-depth in my documentary FREE FOR ALL! which you can see online for free right now. I also produced a video about ACORN with Video the Vote focusing on the fraud of voter fraud.

David Iglesias, a Republican U.S. Prosecutor for New Mexico, investigated allegations of voter fraud throughout the state at the urging of Republican leaders, and when he found no evidence and would not prosecute falsely, he was fired, as asserted by David Iglesias in his testimony before Congress and emails recently declassified from Karl Rove.

But again, I don’t want to be accused of dodging the issue–I am just looking to rebut the persistent falsehood which directly affected this kid’s motivation to punk a community organization into losing millions of dollars to help the poor.

O’Keefe is comparable to the FBI informant who brought down the Bronx terrorist plot — only that there would not have been any actual plot were it not for this FBI informant actively recruiting mentally challenged Muslims from Mosques for this plot, which apparently involved entrapping people who were dumb enough to listen to him.

O’Keefe could well have actually attempted to show something about ACORN’s voting registration controversies–like speak to registrants who admitted falsifying voter registration forms, or followed up on who registered and who voted, or even interview ACORN directly. But none of those would have involved a minister’s daughter dressing slutty, so you can’t really blame him.

So it came to pass that in this effort to dispute voter registration that Giles and O’Keefe conceived of the worst sounding scandal they could invoke, and traveled the country to ACORN offices across the country to find someone to take their time to humor them in the improv game of “Yes, And.”

And they eventually found some clueless ACORN employees, people far too eager to offer good customer service than employ any common sense. A couple of workers comply with O’Keefe’s outlandish inquiry for underage brothels in dispensing tax advice.

The well-publicized clips are shocking enough, and have been exploited as much as any couple of minutes of video can be. Glenn Beck taunted other networks for not covering it. Even Jon Stewart bunted on it, as if his guest interview were Sistah Souljah. As a potent testament to Stewart’s “Most Trusted Newsman” gatekeeper status, the House next day voted to cut all federal funding for ACORN.

It is worth noting here that what transpired on O’Keefe’s videotape were conversations about hypothetical situations–not actual prostitution, no actual crime, and not proof of an agency-wide policy or program involving prostitution or illegal immigrants. In fact, O’Keefe’s experiment proves this–that several other ACORN offices would not be ensnared by their absurd scenario, and turned away these provocateurs. One office in Philadelphia filed a police report because they were alarmed by the pair.

Ironically, the only thing illegal in some of these tapes is that O’Keefe is filming illegally. States like California and Maryland have strict consent laws about surreptitious recording, which is why the news and entertainment industries have long figured out workarounds for hidden cameras. (Hint: Vegas.)

As the crankosphere raves over how the Media didn’t uncover this, it is worth pointing out that not only are the tactics against the standard of journalism, the lack of disclosure and misrepresentation pushes this expose well out of the range of journalism and in to the realm of entrapment.

As it was, O’Keefe had to misrepresent a conversation where a woman stated up front that their inquiry was illegal, but played along because she figured it was a gag. Another misrepresentation by FOX was the breathless uproar about a woman who joked that she had killed her husband–well after it was established that her husband was alive, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others kept repeating the ridiculous claim for another day, demanding an investigation, since they obviously didn’t have the resources as a major news network to confirm that this guy was alive.

Nor is this O’Keefe’s first foray into being the Tucker Max of conservative hacks. He pulled a stunt on Planned Parenthood entrapping receptionists and donation reps into conversations where he said he wanted to kill off black people, while his compatriot Lila Rose called and claimed to be underage to see if the clinics would report statutory rape. (Lila Rose just recently called for abortions to be held in public squares to create the mass gross-out that would therefore make them all illegal)

In a detailed response from Bertha Lewis and Steven Kest :

O’Keefe has a sordid history of preying on receptionists and other front-line service workers for respected organizations. In 2008 he pulled a similar stunt on Planned Parenthood when he and another female colleague secretly recorded phone conversations with staff who handle fundraising calls at a few of the organization’s affiliates. During the calls, O’Keefe pretended to be interested in setting up funds for low-income women in need of health care. Once the conversation hit a comfortable stride, O’Keefe would change his tune and explain, in explicit language, that his real intent was to target women of color in an effort to control minority populations. The audio recordings were edited in an attempt to make it appear that Planned Parenthood was complicit in accepting donations for racist purposes. O’Keefe’s intent then, as it is now, was to entrap an organization whose mission he is ideologically opposed to, and masquerade his efforts as investigative journalism rather than the propaganda videos they are.

This effort caused a conflict with a collaborator over misrepresenting their targets, as reported by the New York Times:

Not everyone among Mr. O’Keefe’s acquaintances agrees. 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.”

And in college, O’Keefe showed women their place with his video wit, as reported by Media Matters:

As a Rutgers University undergraduate, O’Keefe videotaped a classmate distributing to a Women in Culture and Society lecture a handout that emphasized that a “good wife always knows her place.”

And most tastefully of all, O’Keefe drove around posing as a Publisher’s Clearing House van offering big checks to people, only to taunt them that the money is what was going to bank bailouts. Black people sure are suckers for that one!

Do not-so-subtly racist or sexist stunts count as courts of law? Shouldn’t there be a requirement that they at least be funny, besides mean for the sake of mean?

Is this same adolescent accountability accepted by defense contractors, when Blackwater and its owner Erik Prince are implicated in murder? He just keeps getting contracts. Rep. Darrel Issa from San Diego sent out a letter bragging of cutting ACORN’s money for all of us, then asked us to give him money. San Diego has had political scandals that have led to actual convictions, not simply recordings of speculative conversations. Isn’t it time to slash San Diego’s federal funding? All of this is not to get off subject, though. Whatever angry conservatives want to insist the subject is.

It is natural for many to shirk away from defending ACORN in light of this footage. But this particular exchange is not just cherry-picked—it was planted, nurtured, and harvested, the latest to take down an organization that empowers the numbers that vote Republicans out of office.

John Wellington Ennis is a filmmaker whose most recent documentary, FREE FOR ALL! was hailed by critic Roger Eberg as “engrossing, even enraging.” His production company Shoot First Inc., in Beverly Hills, specializes in unscripted entertainment, such as documentaries, reality TV, comedy, and live music. He blogs at johnennis.tv.

From: Sammon, Bill
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 2:25 PM
To: 005 -Washington
Subject: standards

For those of us who have only been at Fox for a relatively short period of time, it’s useful to remind ourselves that, as journalists, we must always be careful to cover the story without becoming part of the story. At news events, we’re supposed to function as dispassionate observers, not active participants. We are there to chronicle the news, not create it.

That means we ask questions in a fair, impartial manner. When approaching interviewees, we identify ourselves, by both name and news organization, up front. We seek out a variety of voices and views. We take note of the scene in order to bring color and context to our viewers.

We do not cheerlead for one cause or another. We do not rile up a crowd. If a crowd happens to be boisterous when we show it on TV, so be it. If it happens to be quiet, that’s fine, too. It’s not our job to affect the crowd’s behavior one way or the other. Again, we’re journalists, not participants — and certainly not performers.

Indeed, any effort to affect the crowd’s behavior only serves to undermine our legitimate journalistic role as detached eyewitnesses. Remember, our viewers are counting on us to be honest brokers when it comes to reporting — not altering –the important events of the day. That is nothing less than a sacred trust. We must always take pains to preserve that trust.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please stop by.

RICK SANCHEZ: There is something that I got to tell you now. If you watch this show every day- as I mentioned a while ago- you know that I usually don’t suffer fools gladly, especially when it comes to the fools who perpetuate falsehoods.

By the way, we put a call into Fox News for a comment, and we expect an apology. But we’re still waiting. Let me address the Fox News network now. Perhaps the most current way that I can, by quoting somebody who recently used a very pithy phrase. Two words- it’s all I need- ‘you lie.’

Well today, thousands of you flipped through the pages of the Washington Post, only to come across a lie so bold and so upsetting that frankly, I’m not just going to sit here in silence and allow my craft or my news operation to be unfairly maligned, because enough is enough. And, yes, I’m talking to you, Fox News. You, who claim to be ‘fair and balanced’ -at what, I wonder? You know, I don’t know, but I’ve got a couple of ideas. Fox News’s full-page color ad today- it asks, ‘How did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN miss this [story]?’ They’re referring to the picture there of the Tea Party protest in the nation’s capital last Saturday. They are saying that we missed this story. They are saying we did not cover this story. They are using a lie to try and divide people into camps- and, you know, Americans are starting to get tired of this.Look at the bottom of the ad there, that says ‘we cover all the news.’ Really? You do? What, we don’t? You know, that’s an offense to myself and to my colleagues who risked their lives for our viewers in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world to break the news. They’re actually telling people that we didn’t cover a rally on Washington. Really? Rog, roll the tape.

T. J. HOLMES: Tea Party march and rally happening in Washington. Our Paul Steinhauser is there with what appears to be a whole lot of friends gathering around you now.

PAUL STEINHAUSER: In about two hours from now, they’re going to march right behind us down Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol, and that’s where they’ll gather at the west front of the Capitol.

SANCHEZ: Okay, what was that, like made-up video? Am I crazy or did I just watch CNN’s Paul Steinhauser covering the story? You want more? Here’s more.

BETTY NGUYEN: We’re going to check in again with CNN’s Kate Bolduan live at the Capitol.

KATE BOLDUAN: Well, we came down because we heard that they’re actually so many people still stuck on Pennsylvania Avenue trying to make it too. You can see- basically, these people are all still coming from Freedom Plaza.

SANCHEZ: All right. That was CNN’s Kate Bolduan. Here’s another one.

FREDERICKA WHITFIELD: We are joined now by CNN Radio Capitol Hill correspondent Lisa Desjardins.

LISA DESJARDINS: What do you think of Congressman Joe Wilson? (Crowd cheers) See? So there are- there are people here who strongly support Congressman Wilson, Fredericka, and many of them are right here.

SANCHEZ: I don’t know- call me crazy, but that sure looked like our CNN Radio’s Lisa Desjardins. One last one- from our own Jim Spellman, who followed and covered thirty rallies- thirty rallies along the Tea Party Express route from coast to coast the last couple of weeks. Here it is.

DON LEMON: CNN All Platform Journalist Jim Spellman traveled with the Tea Party Express as it made its way across the country.

JIM SPELLMAN: The bulk of the people that are there are for low taxes, less government control, but there really is an element that’s got these kind of outlandish conspiracy theories about death camps and- and about the- you know, this takeover- people comparing President Obama to Hitler, and that really is a sizable thread. It’s not just a couple of people on the edges.

SANCHEZ: All right, I want you to see more proof now, and this is really just an unbelievable coincidence that I want you to see. You see that picture in the ad that they took out? Okay, pay attention to that picture right there on the right. That’s the ad that they took out saying we didn’t cover the event. All right- now, keep an eye on that picture right there. You see the Canadian flag? That’s on their ad- see the Canadian flag right there at the bottom? All right, let me show you this- see the thing on the left now? That’s our tower cam shot of the event, that we used repeatedly throughout those shows. Funny how you can say that we didn’t cover an event by using that picture- that picture that looks an awful lot like our tower cam shot, doesn’t it? And you used it in your ad saying we didn’t cover the story.

By the way, if you want even more proof of our coverage, maybe you should just watch your own shows? Here’s a good one maybe you should watch. There’s a show on Fox News called ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’ You’ve heard of it? Here’s Bill O’Reilly doing a segment called ‘Reality Check.’

BILL O’REILLY: CNN, as we mentioned, covered the anti-Obama protests, of course, but ran into a little trouble.

SANCHEZ: CNN covered the event- there it is. This is Bill O’Reilly showing us covering a story you say we didn’t cover. Let me give that to you again. That was Bill O’Reilly showing CNN’s coverage of a story that Fox News says we didn’t cover- hmm. Can you see- can you say reality checkmate?

O’REILLY: CNN, as we mentioned, covered the anti-Obama protests, of course, but ran into a little trouble.

SANCHEZ: Here’s the fact- we did cover the event. What we didn’t do is promote the event. Just like when thousands marched on Washington to protest the war in Iraq, we covered it as well, probably less than we covered this event. But we didn’t promote it. Bottom line is- we do cover the news, and we did extensively cover this event. We didn’t promote the event- that’s not what real news organizations are supposed to do. We covered the event. I would invite you to look into that distinction between those two words- promote and cover. Cover is kind of like a fair and balanced way of doing things- you get it? You might want to look into that. It’s about letting Americans make up their own minds.

Let me cut to the chase- when thousands of Americans showed up at the nation’s capital to protest big government, we covered it, with four correspondents, two satellite trucks, multiple live interviews- lawmakers on the record and conversations with attendees.

Nadler said the Republican initiative, the Defund ACORN Act, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, singles out a specific organization by name for exclusion from participating in any federal program, in direct violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against Bills of Attainder. The amendment was attached to a student loan bill.

“Today’s Republican amendment is in blatant violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against Bills of Attainder,” said Nadler, the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. “Congress must not be in the business of punishing individual organizations or people without trial, and that’s what this amendment does. Whatever one may think of an organization, the Constitution’s clear ban on Bills of Attainder is there for the protection of all of our liberties.”

The Supreme Court, in decisions dating back to the Civil War era, has held that the Constitution prohibits all legislative acts, “no matter what their form, that apply either to named individuals or to easily ascertainable members of a group in such a way as to inflict punishment on them without a judicial trial….”

Nadler said during the McCarthy era, Congress enacted legislation prohibiting the use of funds to pay the salaries of three federal employees who Congress deemed subversive. The Supreme Court ruled this legislation unconstitutional as a Bill of Attainder.

Nadler added that the amendment, in addition to being clearly unconstitutional, sets a dangerous precedent of Congress punishing politically disfavored groups without any due process.

Last week, the Census Bureau announced that it was cutting ties with the organization, which had been enlisted to assist with the 2010 census count.

On Monday, the Senate voted 83- 7 in favor of an amendment that blocks ACORN from receiving transportation and housing funds. That measure was introduced by Sen. Mike Johanns, R-NE. Johanns introduced a second amendment Thursday, this time to cut off any funding ACORN may receive from the Department of the Interior. The measure passed 85-11 and received a “yea” vote from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, accused Republicans of orchestrating a political stunt. She said ACORN does not receive Interior Department funds and the introduction of the amendment was “unnecessary.”

The bills that the Senate and House amendments are attached to need to be signed into law by President Obama before it can take effect. The language in the amendments can still be changed or stripped from the final version of the bills.

ACORN’s most recent troubles began last week after videotapes surfaced showing employees advising conservative activists who posed as a pimp and a prostitute ways in which they could break the law. The group sponsors voter registration drives and helps low-income people secure housing. ACORN has offices in 110 cities and employs more than 700 people and says it has 400,00 families listed as members.

In a statement released Wednesday in response to videos that showed the two conservative activists, who posed as a prostitute and her pimp, being advised by ACORN employees on ways in which they could purchase a house and fill out tax forms, ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis said the organization would suspend its efforts to attract new clients while an internal investigation is being conducted.

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.

Lewis added that the move to strip ACORN of federal funding was part of a “multiyear political assault stemming variously from the Bush White House, Fox News and other conservative quarters.”

ACORN fired the employees who appeared in the videos. Still, California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called on state Attorney General Jerry Brown to launch an investigation into the group’s activities. The employees in some of the videos were based San Bernardino.

In a floor statement after the House voted 345-75, which included the support of 172 Democrats, to cut off federal funds to the group, Nadler spoke out against the amendment.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A little while ago, the House passed an amendment to the bill that we were considering that says no contract or federal funds may ever go to ACORN, a named organization, or to any individual or organization affiliated with ACORN. Unfortunately, this 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, constituting a Bill of Attainder. The Constitution says that Congress shall never pass a Bill of Attainder. Bills of Attainder, no matter what their form, apply either to a named individual or to easily ascertainable members of a group, to inflict punishment. That’s exactly what this amendment does.

It may be that ACORN is guilty of various infractions, and, if so, it ought to be vetted, or maybe sanctioned, by the appropriate administrative agency or by the judiciary. Congress must not be in the business of punishing individual organizations or people without trial.

That’s what this Amendment did. It is flatly prohibited by the Constitution, and once we ignore the Constitution we ignore constitutional principles. Whatever one may think of the subject matter or the organization, the Constitution and the ban on Bills of Attainder are there for the protection of all of our liberties. It is unfortunate that we passed this, and I hope it is removed in the conference committee.

In a statement after the vote, Boehner said, “today’s overwhelming bipartisan vote to stop all federal funding of ACORN is a victory for American taxpayers. Of course, it is only the beginning. We need to keep up the fight to end taxpayer funding for this troubled organization.”

He added:

House Republicans have worked tirelessly to sever ACORN’s ties to the federal government. Those efforts began to bear fruit late last week when the Census Bureau ended its relationship with ACORN under steady pressure from Republican lawmakers. Though today’s vote indicates that the writing’s on the wall for ACORN, President Obama must indicate whether he will join the Congress in taking decisive action to break all government ties with this corrupt organization.

But Republicans vowed to take their crusade against the organization even further with Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, calling for a Justice Department probe.

ACORN has violated serious federal laws, and today the House voted to ensure that taxpayer dollars would no longer be used to fund this corrupt organization. All federal ties should be severed with ACORN, and the FBI should investigate its activity. This united Republican effort to defund ACORN is a victory for the rule of law and taxpayers across the country.

Sen. John Cornyn, and 26 other Senate Republicans sent a letter Thursday to Reid demanding that he hold public hearing.

“As the organization’s laundry list of fraudulent activity and abuse of taxpayer dollars continues to grow, it is time to crack open ACORN and expose once and for all the organization’s full record of offenses,” Cornyn said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Thursday that she supports those efforts.

“A few people have embarrassed ACORN. We have to have our own investigation,” she said, adding that the employees caught on tape allegedly giving illegal advice is “unacceptable.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, in response to a question by ABC News’ Jake Tapper, that the “conduct.. on those tapes is completely unacceptable. I think everyone would agree with that. The administration takes accountability extremely seriously.”

ACORN has been a target of Republican lawmakers and operatives for nearly a decade over false claims of voter registration fraud.

At the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, the Justice Department issued a directive to every U.S. attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent, according to a former federal prosecutor.

David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico, recalled receiving an email in late summer 2002 from the Department of Justice suggesting “in no uncertain terms” that US attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials “to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases,” Iglesias wrote in his memoir, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration.

Iglesias was fired in 2006 after he refused to prosecute what turned out to be unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud leveled against ACORN.

Last year, during the height of the presidential campaign ACORN once again became a target of Republican attacks over claims the organization was involved in a nationwide voter registration fraud scheme.

Trying to salvage his campaign last year, John McCain declared ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

In his book, Iglesias recounted how the Department of Justice aggressively pushed him and other US attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, an issue the former US attorney says the DOJ became unusually obsessed with.

“The e-mail imperatives came again in 2004 and 2006, by which time I had learned that far from being standard operating procedure for the Justice Department, the emphasis on voter irregularities was unique to the Bush administration,” Iglesias wrote.

Iglesias said that Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes.

“But there was a more sinister reading to such urgent calls for reform, not to mention the Justice Department’s strident insistence on harvesting a bumper crop of voter fraud prosecutions.”

“Not only did the [Bush] administration stoop to such seamy expedients to press its agenda in 2004,” Iglesias wrote. “It had the full might and authority of the federal government and its prosecutorial powers to accomplish its ends.”