Let me give you an example. Earlier this week, three teens attending a summer camp at Virginia Tech told campus police they saw a man carrying what might be a rifle of some kind. As soon as this information reached CNN, it went on air as, you guessed it, “breaking news.” Breaking news, course, grabs viewers’ attention.

Since Virginia Tech was not long ago the scene of a horrible gun attack that left many dead, CNN was arguably justified in running its bulletin. But throughout the day, the “breaking news” bulletins continued – without so much as a sliver of new information to help viewers understand what had happened. CNN’s “breaking news” was over late in the day only when campus police cancelled the lockdown of the university and called off the search for the illusory gunman. Ditto, MSNBC and Fox News.

But my real beef with cable – and with much of print media and almost all of the blogosphere – concerns far more serious issues. When I was in journalism school, I was taught about “Objectivity.” And when I went to work for the AP, I was handed their little booklet on the same subject.

Objectivity in those days meant that if I was covering a speech by a notorious demagogue, I’d have to find a external source to quote so my readers would know that the speaker was a notorious demagogue. I couldn’t do it myself – even though I knew the truth — because “that would make me part of the story.”

And if an external source wasn’t immediately available, the quote might go unanswered for at least the first edition. It was this very sacred tenet of journalism that produced story after story in which the lead told of charges by Senator Joe McCarthy and an alternative view – if there was one at all – was written way down into the text.

And so it is on TV as well. Last year Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said on TV and in print that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue. This is a claim often made by Republican politicians, but it is denied by every responsible Republican economist I know and is clearly out of line with all known facts on the subject. The empirical evidence shows the Bush tax cuts produced no new revenue. Yet McConnell not only stuck to his statement – unchallenged – but also asserted that this was “the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”

Let’s hope that when Mitt Romney, seen today as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, endorses the McConnell view – and he will — there’ll be someone in the studio to challenge his “facts.”

We saw the same kind of “objectivity” during the “bargaining” over increasing the debt limit. Over and over, Republican spokespersons would try to sell us the insane idea that if we just shrank everybody’s budget to the vanishing point, obliterating the jobs of police, firefighters, EMTs, teachers, et cetera, we could balance the budget and create jobs. Just what jobs would thus be created remains unclear.

And since the Republicans were the first to speak, their claims occupied the leads in most of the stories covering the debt ceiling circus. Democratic politicians hit back, to be sure, but the public tends to remember the first thing it hears.

And so it was with the “economic plan” put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, labeled by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as the “innovative thinker du jour.”

Krugman noted that Ryan “has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his ‘Roadmap for America’s Future’, a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes.” News media coverage, he said, “has been overwhelmingly favorable.”

He cited a glowing profile of Ryan that The Washington Post put on its front page, “portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience.”

Ryan, Krugman continued, is “often described with phrases like ‘intellectually audacious.’ But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.”

Krugman continued: “Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits ‘in apocalyptic terms’. And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: ‘The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.’ But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.”

But most Americans never heard Krugman or any other journalist whose ideas even got close to Krugmans. The TV “debates” over his plan were dumbed down to pre-K levels – if they could be reduced to a 10-second sound bite. Ryan was incessantly hailed as “courageous” – even by Democrats who grudgingly acknowledged that “it took guts” to propose such a radical plan. That’s the same radical plan, by the way, that would turn Medicare into a voucher program; every senior would get a voucher to go out and buy private insurance, and if the insurance premium was higher than the value of the voucher, well, tough.

Another of the media’s pratfalls came in its non-response to the Republicans’ reluctance to create any new revenue by slightly increasing the taxes of the country’s wealthiest. The GOP talking points included the falsehood that these taxpayers were the nation’s “job creators.” (in other iterations, the job-creators were America’s small businesses). The “small businesses” included among the GOP’s wealthiest 400, by the way, include some of the country’s largest privately owned farms, which not only create very few jobs but in fact receive massive subsidies from the Department of Agriculture.

How utterly absurd is the proposition that the wealthiest among us create jobs for the poorest among us! If this were demonstrably true, based on experiential data, the country would have created millions of jobs during the George W. Bush presidency. What we know is that not a single job – not one – was created during the eight years of George Bush, despite tax cuts for the rich.

The Republicans are quite correct in their conviction that the country needs to reduce its deficit. But to reduce the deficit at a time when the economy cries out for stimulus, to reduce the deficit by cutting programs – and the millions of jobs that go with them – is the height of both historical ignorance and a brand of hubris not seen since that guy said, “bring ‘em on.”

When politicos lie or bend the truth, we tend to forgive them – most voters think most politicians lie all the time. But where is the check and balance? It used to be our newspapers. But today we have a shrinking number of newspapers we can rely on to at least try to tell us the truth. We have a TV medium that is money-centered, uncreative, and dismissive of any scintilla of common sense among their viewers. And we have a blogosphere wildly out of control with partisanship.

At least with most of the blogosphere, the biases are obvious and the reader always knows where he/she stands. That’s the way it was in the early days of journalism in America. So maybe those of us who try to stay informed today should simply read “FiredogLake” followed by “Red State.”

That would certainly simplify our lives.

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

Detainees sit around the exercise yard in Camp 4, the facility within Camp Delta at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood

Every now and then I’m forcefully reminded of the extent to which Guantánamo is still used by unscrupulous lawmakers as a political plaything, even though it is a place where, by any objective measure, a small number of terrorist suspects are held alongside insignificant Taliban foot soldiers and others unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Bush administration decided that the Geneva Conventions were “quaint” and that it would be a good idea to offer substantial bounty payments for anyone who could be dressed up as a terrorist by the US military’s Afghan or Pakistani allies.

One of these instances of shameful political maneuvering arose last week, when the Wall Street Journal published an article explaining that “Republican staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee recently traveled to Spain, Germany, France and other countries to dig for evidence of lax oversight of former detainees transferred there.”

The Journal described the trip as “an indicator of the next phase of the fight” over Guantánamo, focused on whether the release of prisoners to their home countries, or to third countries if they face the risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, “can continue at the same pace” that it has over the last 21 months, with the release of 64 men under President Obama.

This news was shocking for two particular reasons, both of which reveal deep cynicism on the part of the two men responsible for the trip: Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, the senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has stated the administration should “start prioritizing the safety and security of the American people over the so-called rights of these terrorists,” and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, who has complained about what he has called the “administration’s politicized rush to shut down Gitmo and release dangerous inmates,” and who has apparently written to Attorney General Eric Holder “seeking documents related to the decisions to transfer detainees.”

The first reason for shock at the latest attempt by Sens. Bond and Sessions to undermine efforts to close Guantánamo is that all of the transfers from the prison were approved by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, an interagency body established by President Obama to review the remaining Guantánamo cases. The Task Force was led by Matthew G. Olsen, a lawyer with the Department of Justice for 12 years (who, in other words, had served eight years under President Bush), and it consisted of around 60 lawyers, analysts and agents, including representatives from the intelligence agencies (in other words, a cross-section of career officials who did not obviously have a radical left-wing ax to grind).

In addition, when the Task Force delivered its report in January, its members presented an extremely cautious appraisal, concluding that, of the 174 men still held, 35 should face trials, 48 should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial (which should please Sens. Bond and Sessions as much as it has enraged opponents of Guantánamo), and the remainder — around 90 men at present — were eligible for transfer.

However, no sooner had the Task Force issued its findings than the President announced a moratorium on the transfer of any prisoners to Yemen, following hysterical overreaction to the news that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, had apparently been recruited in Yemen. As 58 of the men approved for transfer were Yemenis, and there is no sign of when, if ever, the President will lift the moratorium, this means that Sens. Bond and Sessions are fretting about the release of just 32 men — all of whom, to reiterate, have been approved for transfer by a Task Force of cautious career officials.

The second reason for shock at the outrage manufactured by Sens. Bond and Sessions — along with the mention of Sessions’ letter to Attorney General Holder “seeking documents related to the decisions to transfer detainees” — is that no prisoner can actually be released from Guantánamo without the approval of Congress in the first place.

Last October, Lt. Col. David Frakt, a law professor and the former military defense attorney for two Guantánamo prisoners, pointed out that, in summer 2009, Congress “passed a law that requires the Administration to give Congress 15 days notice before releasing anyone from Guantánamo.” Lt. Col. Frakt explained that this is what had happened to his client, Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan, and a former child prisoner, who had won his habeas corpus petition in July, but had not been released from Guantánamo until Congress had reviewed his case. As he also explained:

I consider this Congressional notification requirement to be blatantly unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of powers. In Jawad’s case, it meant that after the Executive Branch and the Judiciary had concluded there was no lawful basis for the military to detain Mohammed Jawad (after the Department of Justice ultimately conceded the habeas corpus petition), the military was required to continue to detain him at Guantánamo at the order of the legislature, Congress. As I explained in Federal District Court, this placed Jawad in the status of “Congressional prisoner,” a status for which there is no Constitutional authority.

Lt. Col. Frakt added that this, coupled with a “refusal to authorize funds for detainees to be resettled in the United States — even those determined to be innocent of any wrongdoing who should qualify for political asylum,” revealed “the extent of Congressional depravity on any issues related to detainees.”

However, although he was undoubtedly correct to assert that Congress had no authority to interfere in the cases of prisoners determined by the Executive and the Judiciary to be unlawfully held, he conceded that, “It may be that, if the US is contemplating releasing a detainee that it has the lawful basis to detain under the laws of war, that Congress can legitimately condition the expenditure of US funds to effectuate the release on the provision of this notification to Congress.”

In other words, Congress already has extensive powers not only to review a prisoner’s case before release for 15 days, but also, if it wishes, to raise questions about the expenditure involved. This realization, coupled with the fact that the likes of Sens. Bond and Sessions have already succeeded in stopping the release of any prisoners to Yemen, thoroughly undermines the credibility of any attempt by either Senator to turn the release of Guantánamo prisoners to Europe and other countries into an opportunistic new campaign against the closure of the prison.

Despite the Senators’ best efforts to stir up dissent on the deceptive basis that they have no say over the administration’s transfer policy — and the Wall Street Journal’s willing part in promoting these lies — the Republican staffers were unable to pinpoint any specific problems they encountered in their visit to Europe, where the prisoners released have either had their release approved by federal court judges (through their habeas corpus petitions), or by the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Lamely, they “declined to say whether the delegation uncovered any evidence of detainees being in touch with suspected al-Qaeda affiliates” — because there clearly was no evidence of anything of the kind – and, “[w]ithout offering details,” claimed that “some countries’ monitoring of detainees differed from what the administration has described.”

This was countered by an Obama administration official “involved in overseeing the Guantánamo transfers,” who stated that “US security officials receive regular reports from countries hosting transferred detainees,” and explained that, although the reports “include details of behavioral problems by some detainees, some of whom are experiencing culture shock,” there was absolutely no evidence that any of the men were “dangerous,” and none “has been confirmed or suspected of re-engaging” with terror groups.

This denial of the scaremongering of Sens. Bond and Sessions was only introduced towards the end of the article, but it should have been sufficient to silence the Senators. Elsewhere, however, it was made clear that they were also obsessed with the propaganda that regularly emerges from the Pentagon regarding the supposed “recidivism” of released prisoners, which, on its last outing, in January this year, involved an outrageous claim that 20 percent of the prisoners released under President Bush — at least 110 men — had “returned to the fight.”

I have previously dealt with the shocking unreliability of this figure and its obvious genesis as black propaganda aimed at keeping Guantánamo open — citing thorough research by the Seton Hall Law School and the New America Foundation, refuting the Pentagon’s claims — but even on this point the Republican critics were unable to establish why, as the Journal put it, “Mr. Obama should abandon the release policy in light of that figure,” for the simple reason that, of the 66 men released by Obama, only one, an Afghan named Abdul Hafiz, released in December 2009, has allegedly “returned to the fight,” reportedly joining the Taliban in Afghanistan.

With no case whatsoever, and lies and deceit aplenty, Sens. Bond and Sessions should cease their negative campaigning, stop wasting tax-payers’ money on cynical jaunts to Europe, accept that Obama’s release policy is deeply cautious, and start answering some more difficult questions instead, such as why they think it is appropriate to suspend the release of 58 men to Yemen, approved for transfer by the cautious officials of the President’s Task Force. If they were capable of thinking straight, they would realize that all that does is inflame anti-American sentiment in Yemen, where the entire population has, essentially, been accused of being terrorist sympathizers.

Originally published on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Photo/White House photographer Pete Souza

The Democratic Party’s embarrassing electoral disaster in Massachusetts, losing a seat held for 46 years by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, provided a clear warning that the party, and President Obama’s presidency, are headed for an epic trouncing this November, when all members of the House and a third of the Senate face reelection.

But all the frantic strategizing within the sclerotic Democratic Party leadership ignores the bigger crisis yet to come for this party that once brought the nation Social Security, unemployment compensation, public jobs programs and Medicare. That crisis is the economy, which is now showing signs of falling off a second cliff instead of beginning to recover.

Thanks to the abject failure of President Obama to boldly order up a massive jobs program and a full-blown economic stimulus program of public investment at the beginning of his term last spring, and his failure to attack the entrenched banking interests by smashing apart the mega-investment banks that had turned banking into a casino game, the economy has been left to stagnate for a year.

Unemployment has continued to rise, with the latest reports showing that layoffs have begun to re-accelerate. Unemployment rose in 43 states, including some of the biggest, in December and fell in only four. And we are only seeing the beginning of this new drive into the ditch. The most ominous, and totally predictable, trend is layoffs by the public sector–by towns, counties, states, and public bodies such as public universities, school districts, public hospitals and transit companies.

These layoffs which could ultimately number in the millions and which will have a knock-on effect on all kinds of other jobs, were deferred because of aid provided last year by the federal government, but no more federal aid is likely to be forthcoming and the money already provided runs out this summer. Look for official unemployment this year to move past the 11 percent record set in 1982. Meanwhile, real unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for work, and those who have managed to get part-time work, is approaching 20 percent, and could eventually top 25 percent–a rate reminiscent of the Great Depression.

At the same time, the foreclosure crisis, and the related decline in home values which has put one-fourth of all homes “underwater,” meaning they’re worth less than the mortgage balance, continues unabated. Time magazine, in its first issue of the new year, predicts that at least as many homes will go into foreclosure in 2010 as in the record year just ended–over 3 million houses. Equally bad, the magazine says that many housing experts are predicting that property values, which have lost an average of 30 percent since 2006, will continue to decline until into 2013! Already, American homeowners have lost over $7 trillion in wealth because of property value declines, and they will continue to lose more.

In an economy where 72 percent of all financial activity involves consumers buying stuff, it is impossible to imagine where any growth or recovery in the economy could come from when the American people are being so battered financially.

For almost a year, the government has hidden this disaster behind a rising stock market, which rose in seeming contradiction to all the bad news, as companies slashed costs to eke out profits from drastically reduced revenues. Many analysts say that this bizarre behavior of the equities markets was the likely result of behind-the-scenes government intervention in markets. Consider this: for the whole period between March 9, 2009, when the market began its rebound, and the present, a period during which the equities markets recovered roughly 60 percent of the ground they’d lost in the last crash, corporations were net sellers of their stock, and retail investors were basically out of the market.

Foreign investors entered the market, but not in any huge way. Hedge funds, too, normally big players, were experiencing outflows of investor cash during most of the period, making it unlikely that they were investing either. Even pension funds, which were badly burned in the crash, were cautious investors over the past year. So who’s left? Suspicion falls on the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. This might explain why stocks have continued to rise on very low trading volume, and also why most of the upside has come, especially since last September, in after-hours trading in S&P futures, not in direct buying of shares during regular trading hours. If true, what this means is that the federal government has been doing what it fines hedge funds and investment banks for doing: manipulating the markets.

While the Fed and Treasury can theoretically manipulate the stock market, they cannot do this forever, and this past week, we have seen indications that the bull run in the market, whatever caused it, may have run out of steam.

If the economy does take a second plunge similar to what happened in late 2008 and 2009, Obama and the Democrats will have to accept the full blame. They had the opportunity last year to strike hard at the root causes of economic decline and at the sinister, greedy and corrupt activities of Wall Streets banks and investment banks. Because they chose instead to try and paper over the problem and accomodate those banks–even helping them to become bigger and more powerful– they will deserve the electoral drubbing that is coming.

It would be a huge and historic mistake for Democrats to listen to the advice of people like White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who are claiming that the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat to a Republican means it is necessary for the party to hew even further to the right. Yes, Massachusetts voters were voting for a guy who said he would kill the health bill in Congress, but polls suggest that his winning margin came from 7 percent of self-described liberal Democrats who told exit pollsters that the health bill was terrible and they wanted it killed.

That seven percent is a huge number, when you consider how hard it would be for most Democrats to vote for a hard-line conservative candidate–someone who openly advocates waterboarding of terrorist suspects, and who is adamantly anti-abortion rights.

What really turned the trick for the GOP candidate, Scott Brown, though, was the economy. The rank-and-file working person (Republican or Democrat), both in Massachusetts and in the US at large, has seen enough over the past year to conclude that the Democrats in Congress and the Man-o-Change in the White House do not have their interests at heart. They clearly see that this government’s actions in support of the banks, the insurance companies, and the other giant industries in the US, from autos to utilities, are not being taken in the cause of bringing benefits to the people, but are simply being done for the benefit of those industries and their leaders and key investors. It’s not even “trickle down” anymore. It’s just catering to the rich and powerful–the people who make all those fat campaign contributions.

This is why Obama’s sudden “pivot” (people who have real values don’t “pivot”) to a tacky “populist” rhetoric about “fat-cat bankers” is falling on deaf ears. It’s why Democratic leadership calls for Congress to just pass the wretched Senate version of the health bill are being viewed with disgust by the public.

Everyone realizes it’s all just image-mongering. Nobody in power in Washington, Democrat or Republican, is there to help the little folks.

It’s all about making the rich richer.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Scott Brown, the Republican Senator-elect from Massachusetts, defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in a special election Jan. 18 for the seat vacated by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Photo/Wikimedia

The media punditry, corn-fed on conventional wisdom, are all atwitter about Tuesday’s Democratic debacle in Massachusetts, saying the trouncing of the Democratic candidate for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, by upstart State Senator Scott Brown means Democrats in Congress should abandon plans to push through a House-Senate compromise health bill, and instead just go with the Senate’s version of health “reform” legislation, thus circumventing a certain Republican filibuster attempt.

Brown campaigned promising to be the “41st vote” to kill the Obama health bill.

The Senate bill, remember, is the dreadful health bill version that outlaws abortion coverage for anyone getting subsidized insurance, and that taxes the hell out of health insurance benefits that are the mainstay of many middle-income and working-class families, not to mention mandating that people with low incomes spend significant assets they don’t have to buy lousy insurance they may not want or need. As bad as the House version is, the Senate bill is even worse.

It is a crummy bill, cobbled together from bits and pieces of self-serving elements submitted by health industry lobbyists, who have spent the last year swarming over the Senate like ants and maggots over a fetid, unrecognizeable lump of roadkill.

The call for the House to adopt the Senate plan, so as to avoid a filibuster, is advice that would doom the Democrats in 2010. While that might well be a good thing, given the sorry excuse for an alternative to the Republicans that the Democrats have become, I would argue that the time is right for the small rump of Democrats who are still progressives to take a stand.

Why?

Because they have the power to drive a stake through the corporatists who run the Democratic Party, and who have been working assiduously for decades to neuter the party and especially its progressives caucus. If progressive members of the House simply refuse to vote for the Senate version of the health bill, it cannot go forward.

The reason President Barack Obama’s health plan, the president’s and the Democratic Party’s support have all cratered even in that most emblematic Democratic state of Massachusetts is not that Republicans are resurgent. It is not even that unaffiliated voters have turned from Obama, though certainly some have. It’s that Democrats have become disgusted with the man they turned out for so enthusiastically in November 2008, with his “plan” for health “reform,” and with the party that they gave such a resounding victory to in Congress that same election and in 2006.

Democratic voters–especially liberal Democrats–are rightly feeling punked. Even those who did hold their noses and voted for Coakely in Massachusetts, were not doing it with any enthusiasm, and certainly weren’t hustling their friends and coworkers to vote along with them.

And the Obama/Democrat health care reform sellout is only one of their complaints. There is also the Obama cave-in to Wall Street, and his enormous escalation of the Afghanistan War, his failure to restore Constitutional government, and his wishy-washy efforts on climate change. And of course there’s the willing complicity of the Democrats in both houses of Congress.

It’s funny to recall that a year ago, it was common to hear pundits pronouncing the death of the Republican Party. Now, it appears that it is actually the Democratic Party that is headed for history’s dumpster–with President Obama and the party’s corrupt hack leadership in Congress in the driver’s seat of the careening truck.

Coakley was true to form as the party’s standard-bearer in this collapse. Even as her candidacy was heading for the rocks, instead of campaigning hard for the state’s liberal base, she headed off on January 12, just a week ahead of the special election, to pander to lobbyists from the health industry and collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bribes from them. No wonder her base deserted her or just stayed home!

Hell, if I were in Massachusetts, I’d vote have for Coakley’s GOP opponent. The former Cosmopolitan centerfold model may be just a buffer version of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, but at least he has vowed, if elected, to kill the Senate health bill.

For that alone he deserved progressive Democrats’ support.

The Mass. mayhem proves that Democrats in Congress area headed for a historic and well-earned rout this November. Progressive Democrats in House and Senate should be cutting themselves loose as soon as possible from this sinking ship and following the lead of Vermont’s independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. There is no home for progressives in the Democratic Party. They now have a historic opportunity to send the corporatist Democrats off to their well-deserved demise, while forging the Congressional core of something new: a true progressive opposition party representing America’s working people.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

In reviewing the columns over the past few years, we wrote against racism and animal cruelty. But, there’s still racism and animal cruelty, so we’ll still have to speak out on these critical social issues.

We wrote about tolerance and the acceptance of all races and religions. But, a large number of Americans apparently didn’t get the message, so we’ll have to try harder this year.

We wrote about the continued destruction of the environment and of ways people are trying to save it. Environmental concern is greater, but so is the ignorant prattling of those who believe global warming is a hoax.

We wrote against government corruption, bailouts, tax advantages for the rich and their corporations, governmental waste, and corporate greed. But, since they still exist, we’ll have to continue speaking against those as well.

We wrote about the effects of laying off long-time employees and of outsourcing jobs to “maximize profits.” But until Americans realize that “cheaper” doesn’t necessarily “better,” we’ll continue to have to write why exploitation knows no geographical boundaries.

We wrote in support of the rights of workers, for better working conditions and benefits at least equal to their managers. We didn’t expect to see anything change, but we were hopeful that a small minority of business owners who do respect the worker would influence the rest. Until that happens, we’ll still have to write about labor issues.

We wrote in support of helping the unemployed, the homeless, those without adequate health coverage—and against the political lunatics who continue to deny the disenfranchised and marginalized the basics of human life. Unfortunately, not much has changed over the past few years.

For many years, we had written about the need for health reform. At the end of last year, Americans got a partial victory, but there is still much more that needs to be done.

We wrote against the media’s fixation with celebrity skanks and scandals. We doubt anything will change this year, but we’ll still comment upon the media’s neglect of what’s important—and their fascination with what isn’t.

We wrote about why newspapers and magazines died, why the rest have downsized their staffs and the quality of their news product. We doubt anything will change this year, but we still have to bring the issues to the public.

We wrote about problems in the nation’s educational system, especially the failure to encourage intellectual curiosity and respect the tenets of academic integrity. But there are still those who believe education is best served by a program manacled by teaching-to-the-test mentality.

We had written forcefully against the previous president and vice-president when they strapped on their six-shooters and sent the nation into war in a country that posed no threat to us, while failing to adequately attack a country that housed the core of the al-Qaeda movement. We wrote about the Administration’s failure to provide adequate protection for the soldiers they sent into war or adequate and sustained mental and medical care when they returned home.

We wrote about the Administration’s belief in the use of torture and why it thought it was necessary to shred parts of the Constitution. Fortunately, last year, we saw a new administration that recognizes that torture is not only wrong but counter-productive to acquiring good information, and that the Constitutional fabric of the United States must be preserved, no many how many threats are made upon it. Unfortunately, at all levels of government, Constitutional violations still exist, and a new year won’t change our determination to bring to light these violations wherever and whenever they occur.

The hope we and this nation had for change we could believe in, and which we still hope will not die, has been diminished by the reality of petty politics, with the “Party of No” and its raucous Teabagger mutation blocking social change for America’s improvement.

We really want to be able to write columns about Americans who take care of each other, about leaders who concentrate upon fixing the social problems. But we know that’s only an ethereal ideal. So, we’ll just have to hope that the waters of social justice wear down, however slowly, the jagged rocks of haughty resistance.

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.

Author’s note: This article was written several days before President Obama’s escalation speech at West Point, when it was first leaked that 30,000-plus troops would be bound for Afghanistan.  I offer this as argument that in less than a year, the Obama presidency is a failure, by his own campaign’s definition.  I do so in the hopes of being presented an argument that convincingly counters the evidence of Obama’s policy trajectories presented here.  And, as you will see, Sotomayor and the stimulus bill do not serve a sufficient counterweight to the general body of policy the Obama Administration has so far evinced.

The psychology of previous investment proscribes humans from responding rationally when conditions warrant or even demand.  If the investment has been heavy enough, the psychology behind the investment will insist that people hold on to it, no matter how badly the investment may tank.  This occurs at all scales.  The American public’s investment in Barack Obama is tanking badly.  The question at this point becomes, how much longer can the policy trend lines continue before the body of his political support collapses altogether?

***

President Obama has failed his mandate.

It’s not a happy thing to have to say.  Many won’t agree, desperately fending off the obvious. The campaign sloganeering, well, it turned out to be just that.  All the worse that so many had hoped otherwise. Obama has been embarrassingly supine in dealing with the know-nothings. The end game of which is what, exactly?  Republicans will suddenly — one day — apprehend their misbegotten ways and cuddle the furry kitten? The GOP and their agents continue the attacks, the lies, the filibusters — a well funded font of rancorous, racist, rancid bullshit.  Palin-Beck in 2012!  That’s the ticket.

The last straw was escalation in Afghanistan.  And didn’t he ever drag out the process of doing what the military told him he should do weeks ago?  Perhaps that was suppose to make him look steely-eyed and circumspect.  One wonders what the point of all this review was meant to reveal when the end product is to tap almost all the troops McChrystal wanted in the first place.  In fact, we almost suspect that McChrystal may have high-balled his numbers as a negotiation entry point.  Then again, maybe not.  Because McChrystal knows he is dealing with a Democrat, one who seems especially smitten with getting along.  Which meant, of course, that Obama would meet McChrystal’s opening bid, with the necessary appearance of due diligence of course, because, well, that’s how Democrats roll.  They are the party of looking like they’re for “the people.”  The “review” at this point looks like mere window dressing.  Whether it was or was not is unimportant.  Certainly, it is unimportant to those on the ground.

If this does go down with plus-30,000 troops, Obama can kiss it goodbye.  Here is the short of it.  One way or another, Afghanistan will be the doom of Obama.  Withdrawal is conventionally seen as political suicide. It matters not that the American and Afghan public would like to see this happen.  Obama will be “ravaged” by foes in Washington.  Just like LBJ fretted.  Once Afghanistan turns more deeply unpopular — more than now — political forces will then turn that against Obama, and it will become his Vietnam.  If this escalation is a cave to military pressure and political considerations (and really, what else could it be?), then Obama may think he is staving off a near term political hit.  In reality, he is only delaying political doom.  And worse, he is consigning to their deaths, who knows how many more thousands, ravaging the land and the lives of millions more.

Tellingly, the left are squabbling about whether Obama is worse than Bush.  Indeed, when one finds oneself in a position of defending any president by trying to demonstrate that they are “not worse than Bush,” or even mentioning, in a subjunctive clause, that Obama is not “worse than Bush,” the admission is plain: failure.

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Obama has pathetically caved to most every Republican yowl on every domestic bill, only to watch no Republicans even vote for the butchered bill anyway.  The health care botch will be the same [see below].

Obama demands Israel halt building on the West Bank, only to watch Israel approve more building on the West Bank.

Obama shamefully and shamelessly pulled a complete one-eighty on the odious FISA amendment.  To his great pleasure now, as he only balloons the already expansive surveillance state [see below].  On the plus side, he did this before he was president.

Obama has adopted all Bush era legal positions and then some — even asserting sovereign immunity — in warrentless wiretap lawsuits and beyond.

Obama has quietly backed renewal of the worst of the PATRIOT Act provisions, and doing so over the objections of fellow Democrats.

Obama has only escalated, atrociously so given his “Si, se puede” campaign, immigration raids and harassment across the country, the American Apparel episode especially mean-spirited in a time of brutal recession.  Only recently, a janitorial company “quietly let go” many illegal immigrants, a move that is part of an Obama administration plan to  “thin the ranks of illegal immigrants by going after the companies that hire them.”  Now, there’s a plan.  All those homeless nurses and accountants piling up in LA tent cities can go work as janitors now that the illegals have been purged.

Obama has continued to assert the power to conduct extraordinary renditions, or, as the Italian court that convicted 23 Americans (22 CIA) of just such an operation called it, “kidnappings”.

Obama has continued to assert the power to hold detainees indefinitely, without charge.  Apparently, he intends to do so.

Obama has continued to assert the power to conduct military tribunals in lieu of trial.  Apparently, he intends to do so.

Obama has continued to assert the power to spy on Americans.  Apparently, he intends to do so. With sovereign immunity.

Obama has continued to assert the power to torture and abuse detainees secretly, specifically within the confines of US SOC base at Bagram, and a similar facility at Balad Air Base in Iraq.

Obama has adopted a position on the Guantanamo detainees so arbitrarily pendulous, it makes Bush look like a model of sober reason: no trials for anyone. Say what you will about that, but it is consistent.  Obama’s “position” is no position at all.  He’s all over the map.  Particle and wave.  “Whatever works.”  Yes, he really is a Democrat.

Obama will fail to close Guantanamo Bay as a detainee prison by his own deadline and admission.  Obama fired the man who was trying to close it according to Obama’s own agenda [see below].  I predict this may go on for years, as Obama attempts to keep the GOP from swatting him on the issue.  And once again, petty domestic politics drive policy.

Obama has overseen the worsening of conditions at Guantanamo Bay.

Obama has upped the US military footprint in South America by bumping up military presence in Colombia, with the lapdog enthusiasm of a visibly excited Uribe on full display.  Pissing off everyone else, of course, but no matter.  Tensions are bound to escalate beyond those already on the rise.

Obama displayed an unaccountable hypocrisy and equivocation regarding the Honduran coup, even as his administration railed against Tehran for election rigging.  Of course, the one-way outrage is not unaccountable at all, and certainly not when one’s own military base is quietly involved.

Obama has continued to embrace long standing US-resistance to treaties banning landmines and other passive, deadly weapons, weapons that kill thousands of children every year.  This, even as the world observed the 20 year anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the passing of which was notable only for the sole company the United States keeps in refusing ratification of that treaty: Somalia.

Obama has deployed private mercenaries in Somalia.

Obama has only continued the escalation of the Pentagon budget, and emergency off-the-books contingency funds.

Obama has more currently deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan than Bush ever did.  And he is about to up that unhappy fact in Afghanistan again.  Certainly, we will be assured there will be a timeline for withdrawal. And certainly, it will be a sham.

Obama is expanding the US “Embassy” in Islamabad to behemoth proportions, in keeping with the model presented to the world in Baghdad.  Pakistanis are fuming at this project, viewing it rightly as a “military and intelligence command outpost.”

Obama has promoted, rather than denounced and fired, the commander of JSOC, which oversaw extreme abuse and torture of detainees.  Under McChrstyal’s command, many subordinates were convicted of such crimes.  No one above of the rank of major was convicted, despite “the documented role of more senior officers and civilian officials in authorizing and then covering up these crimes.”

Obama intends that the “withdrawal” from Iraq will be as every bit as farcical as has always been planned.  Major permanent military bases (and a billion dollar embassy) holding 50-60,000 troops, scattered hither and pointedly yon.  Oil contracts are in the works.

Obama is escalating a global missile defense shield, first actively begun by Reagan, mandated by the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance and then later by the plowed under Project for the New American Century.  The putative suspension of the installations in Poland and Czech Republic was a technical ruse.  There will be missiles and radar in those places, and elsewhere, such Romania and Bulgaria.  Plans are afoot for footprints in Georgia, Azerbaijan and beyond the Caspian.

Obama has escalated pipeline negotiations throughout Central Asia.  This may not sound bad.  Did I mention that Blackwater and JSOC are conducting military operations in Uzbekistan?  No? Not yet?  [see below.]

Obama has escalated the drone war “dramatically” in Pakistan.  Blackwater appears to be fully involved.  Of course, the whole damned debacle is illegal, but no matter.

Obama continues to embrace the employment of Blackwater, which is roaming wild in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and elsewhere.  Yes, Uzbekistan. In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan

“That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?” Obama has overseen a skyrocketing forty percent increase in private contractors in Afghanistan between June and September of this year.  There is some change here: no other president has overseen a war employing more private contractor personnel than Obama.  Private contractor personnel now comprise fifty-seven percent of all US personnel in Afghanistan.

Obama has coddled Wall Street beyond anyone’s wildest fears.  He has said not a word that I can discern about the bailout sham.  Is he sad that the Wall Street brethren who dumped vast sums on his meteoric rise to the White House behaved so badly before, during, and after the bailout? His administration is more vested with Wall Street chums than the Bush White House.  A ghastly embarrassment.

Obama got needlessly shabby on Greg Craig.  Another embarrassment.  A gross performance and easily as bad as anything Bush ever did.  But worse, because Craig was pushing Obama’s own agenda and got burned because Obama discovered some scary things that make that ol’ Constitution just as silly as Bush and Cheney always said it was.

Obama is watching key supporteres flee his administration, either forcibly or by choice: personal matters.

Obama is pushing the Congressional Black Caucus and the GOP together in refusing to address the concerns of the CBC regarding financial reform.  “Waters suggested the CBC’s 43 members could vote with the GOP to scuttle a variety of Democratic bills if Obama and Emanuel don’t address what she thinks is a lack of understanding of the CBC’s wide-ranging goals of reducing urban unemployment, home foreclosures and bank failures.” Obama continues to ignore the Don Siegelman miscarriage, and leaves Bush/Rove DoJ hacks in situ in Alabama.  Siegelman claims that there has  been  “no substantial change in the heart of the Department of Justice from the Bush-Rove Department of Justice.”  The judge who oversaw the travesty, Mark Fuller, is friends with all the DoJ Rovian Canarys, and had a personal grudge against Siegleman.  Fuller is in ownership of a defense contracting company that fuels Air Force One.

Obama stood back on health care reform and watched the carnage from the sidelines.  He stood nowhere, for nothing.  Congress made a hash of it, as is their wont.  Who knows what it will actually do, but it will get tens of millions of new customers for the insurance companies.  In all likelihood, the bill will wind up being a shameless corporate crap shoot, without the snake eyes.  The man who once said single payer was the obvious solution, sat on his hands while a vestigial public option was ravage further, and pernicious C Street amendments popped up like ulcerous sores.  Not a word.  He’ll sign anything at this point.

Obama has ramped up the secret surveillance state beyond mortal reckoning.  There are estimates, of course, wherein numbers drop into the $50-100 Billion* bin. Under Obama, the NSA is building a giant secret facility in Utah that will house a Yottabyte archive.  Surveillance state “Fusion Centers” are spreading like wildfire.

Obama has thrown out a trail balloon about cutting NASA’s budget.  Yes, let’s cut that one half of one percent of the federal budget that goes to that wastrel NASA.  All that fancy pants galavantin’ about the solar system, and … learnin’ stuff.  Can’t recall Bush threatening to cut the NASA budget.  He wanted to kill Hubble — the certitude of that “billions of years” talk shook his biblical bones — but at least he wanted to go to Mars or some crazy shit.  Now, NASA are talking to the Chinese about partnering up.  Change!   Not exactly the change I was imagining.

Obama’s glamour is wearing thin.  In fact, it’s threadbare.  The Chinese know it.  He’s a pushover.  In this, the investment cannot let go; he is so damned likable.

That is over.  Obama’s plain failure is obvious.  Unlike the election of 2000, 2008 was a known, vital cast, one the American public knew was important.  No one really thought or knew what the stakes would become in 2000 (except perhaps for those in on the fix).  Not so in 2008.  We all knew it.  The wreckage is everywhere.

The above is not an agenda bent on fixing any of it, but reeks of acquiescence and inertia. It demonstrates that Santos knew, two years ago, what we know now.

Mr. Obama, if this truly is your path for the United States, you have failed your mandate.  Not your Goldman Sachs mandate — clearly not — but the one entrusted to you by the American public, one that is desperate for a change of course.  One that still believed it was actually possible.  This is not that change of course.  Though admittedly persistent, as many a dead president may testify, this course is a dead end.  Instead of doing or even attempting to take on the necessary tasks at hand, you have folded across the board.  Cowardice in the face of potent adversaries? or were you in on this all along?

***
* Let’s just note the institutional proclivities here. Up to a $100 Billion per year into op tech to spy on Americans is unremarkable,  secret in fact, yet $80 Billion per year on health care for American citizens redounds to gross public spectacle, reason dragged through the shit strewn ditch, spat upon by clotpols with guns fully strapped.  Because health care for Americans, well, that’s some dangerous stuff, there.
—————–

Kenneth Anderson, an astronomer who has worked on a number of NASA projects, devotes his scientific training to observations and inferences about current affairs, politics and the media. He blogs at boneheadcompendium.com and can be reached at ken-AT-boneheadcompendium.com

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.

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.”