In one of the recent open threads, someone was noting the difficulty of getting good help for community activism, in defense of ACORN. I think if we can't request that our allies not employ people who would
aid and abet a prostitution scheme, if that's too onerous, than we are in trouble. I think it's very hard to defend, not simply the criminality of the ACORN workers in Baltimore (le sigh) and Washington, but their rank stupidity.
Conservative activists have been after ACORN for over a year now. Bertha Lewis notes that activists tried the same stunt several times before they got a bite. In some people's eyes this is exonerating. In my eyes it's more damning. Lewis admits ACORN was aware of the setup, and yet her people still got caught. Twice.
I am willing to be wrong on this one, but it's very hard to see how that sort of sloppiness aids poor people or progressives. It's equally hard for me to be mad at James O'Keefe. Dude is doing his job. We must do ours. Pointing out the dastardly tactics employed by our adversaries doesn't alter that reality.
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It's equally hard for me to be mad at James O'Keefe. Dude is doing his job. We must do ours. Pointing out the dastardly tactics employed by our adversaries doesn't alter that reality.
Problem is, there's really nothing we can do to shame the other side. Rush Limbaugh gets away with saying stuff like
and no one blinks. We're at a disadvantage here.But that said, I'd welcome some hardcore entrapment type journalism like what O'Keefe did aimed at the right wing. It'd certainly be entertaining to watch. I don't think it'd produce any results though.
Hmm. I see "our job" not as doing the same thing as O'Keefe et al, but as having better organization. ACORN is hardly the only grassroots democracy advocacy organization. We need to be supporting those that do it right. I'm with Ta-Nehisi. There's no need to be knee-jerk supporters of ineffective groups that are little more than distractions.
Yes, this.
The what's good for the goose... logic, which some on the left have been employing for as long as I can remember (e.g. We need our own Rush Limbaugh), and it's always seemed misguided to me. I've always found Michael Moore, for instance, to be a dishonest filmmaker that does as much, if not more harm than good. Liberalism has always, to me, meant something closer to what Barack Obama represents than what, say, John Edwards was claiming to represent in the last campaign. It's not about being angry or reactionary. It's about being smart, empathetic, compassionate, and a little skeptical of ideology. It's not that activists don't serve a important purpose; it's that they're often too dogmatic to be trusted.
Being at a disadvantage tends to be the curse of those struggling to do good things. That's just the way it goes.
Re: Problem is, there's really nothing we can do to shame the other side. Rush Limbaugh gets away with saying stuff like
"In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,"
and no one blinks.
No one blinks? Maybe you should read some other blogs. Both Meagan McCardle and Rod Dreher (neither are noted liberals) came down on Limbaugh like two ons of bricks.
I'm late so let me note what an awsome take-down of Brooks you had yesterday. But I'm pretty confused about how O'Keefe's tactics are "dastardly." (Full disclosre: Although I had heard it many times, I had to look it up to make sure I understand what it means: Cowardly and malicious; base)
It's definitely classic gotcha journalism, which has it's problems in the grand scheme of things to be suresure, But it's part of the profession and often serves an important function. I'm not sure how you could catch ACORN in this act in any other way. Journalists do this kind of stuff all the time with corporations, as they should. I realize that ACORN's goals are quite noble on paper, but I just don't see how O'Keef is cowardly or base here.
Holla,
-FreddyBak
I was paraphrasing the defense, with some measure of hyperbole.
As usual, fair enough!
Yeah. Amazingly, impressively stupid. The sort of stupidity that brings down organizations with otherwise noble aspirations. There's no defense for it. The only thing to do is say, "It was a terrible oversight on the part of ACORN officials to have these people working at the organization, much less working in a capacity where it is their role to give advice to the public. The first steps of rectifying the situation have been taken, but the organization has a long road to hoe in regaining the public's trust." Full blown mea culpa. Short of that, the organization deserves to go down and be replaced with one not touched by this idiocy.
Exactly.
I don't think I ever defended ACORN as much as found it a molehill when not viewed through movement conservative magnifying lenses. Fact is, ACORN hired a lot of stupid people and they apparently a wake-up call was not enough. They needed a bulldozer to break in through the bedroom walls. I have no sympathy.
My issue with the tactics isn't really O'Keefe, it's Breitbarn and his Biggovernment website. He's more or less regularly posting 'we'll push buttons to get things out of context to use in propoganda campaigns against our enemies'. And that's text, not subtext. I find him and his agenda vile and to the extent they resort to entrapment of local idiots for purpose of demagoguery against the president I do think it's worth some pushback. Not against the stupidity at any level, but against the idea that this means anything for anyone other than ACORN.
o the extent they resort to entrapment of local idiots for purpose of demagoguery against the president I do think it's worth some pushback.
Right. I don't think ACORN itself merits any defense whatsoever, but I don't see how ACORN being a corrupt organization has much to do with Obama.
Wow where do you begin... If these people are out there then great, put them on videotape so others can see how wrong and stupid and morally corrupt they are. Even if these were isolated incidents and doesn't represent the full value of ACORN, so what? Show ACORN the door and bring in another organization. The right needs to see that in spite of their best efforts there's a lot more to the movement on the left that one organization.
On a more subtle note, I couldn't help but say to myself "oh no, I hope the people caught on tape weren't black" Because you know, if they were, then obviously all of us are as stupid and morally reprehensible as those caught on tape.
BTW, I'm not judging prostitution in general. Goodness knows if the guy who killed that Yale student would have visited one and service
his frustration before it became repressed aggression, then maybe that girl would still be going alive and going to class. I'm just saying maybe. But the thought of underage girls working in a brothel turn my stomach. That's the morally reprehensible part.
I think it's generally fair to judge prostitution in general. Regardless of whether or not you think the violent murderer simply needed a good schtupping. Whether the woman is of age or not, it doesn't change the fact that prostitution is one of the oldest forms of forced labor in the world.
It's also one of the oldest forms of labor in the world. It's not always forced.
I'm aware of that claim. Meh. Most things are not ALWAYS anything. My view is that it's generally forced, and even when it's an explicit example of slavery, it's still not remotely empowering or worth defending. There's fewer sillier arguments than an attempt at a feminist justification/rationalization of prostitution.
The grand majority of prostitutes have become prostitutes because they see no alternative. It's a violent and dangerous. And it would not exist if women felt they had a choice.
Again with the typos.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that going to a prostitute makes a man less violent or saner about women.
Thank you. The argument that men who are violent against women only do so out of sexual frustration has NO evidence to support it and is pernicious in its implications. It leads nearly directly to the "she MADE me do it because she was a tease!" defense.
I mean, just the fact that prostitutes suffer far more violence than most women ought to suggest that access to sex does not prevent violent men from being violent.
The point I was alluding to is that our culture tries to control women by telling them what they can do with their bodies. Maybe if that element were less pervasive, it would not be transmitted to these men who resort to violence as a means of exerting control over women.
Ever since this story broke, I've been wondering if these folks were ever told at an ACORN office that there was no way ACORN would provide that kind of service. I've been really wanting to hear them say (so far, to no avail) that some ACORN staffer asked them if they were out of their minds.
I spent a lot of time defending ACORN during the last election cycle, and I really feel like an idiot now for having done so.
My guess would be, if they tried it at say 6-10 offices and posted video from 3, the remaining offices gave them push back, showed them the door, etc. The people making the video are hardly going for a balanced look at the situation. (Which is fine.) The fact that only Baltimore is shown helping them out with the whole smuggling child prostitutes into the country thing suggests that was a sticking point for DC and NY.
Bertha Lewis notes that activists tried the same stunt several times before they got a bite. In some people's eyes this is exonerating.
Yeah, "only 3/10" or "only 3/6" really is not exculpatory in any way. 1 would be a big deal; establish a pattern and it's an organization-ending situation.
What struck me while watching these ACORN videos was that while people appeared shocked that a woman would be helping a prostitute file her taxes as a performance artist, its basically accepted that wealthy people cheat the IRS out of taxes everyday. It saddens me that suddenly the government accessing American's Swiss Bank accounts is a big news story-shouldnt we have been doing that quite a long time ago? If we collected the billions owed in taxes from cheats and crooks and not just the cheating crooked black celebrities (Snipes and Hammer) maybe we wouldnt be in such a fiscal nightmare.
The IRS and other organs of our government have been trying for years and years to break the Swiss banking secrecy for many different kinds of offensives. It has been a steady but slow process. The Swiss people in general have different views on the right to banking privacy than we do and that is difficult to change.
It is easier said than done to go after wealthy tax cheats or even low level tax cheats like waiters or phony ACORN prostitutes. Snipes on the other hand was the lowest of the low lying fruit, he was a tax protester which is a truther/birther on steriods.
If the IRS was unable on its own to access these accounts why didnt they enlist the help of Congress to pass a law saying as a US citizen it is illegal to hold your moneys in secret Swiss bank accounts and if you are suspected of holding your money in those accounts you will face penalty of jail time for failing to turn over your records. Also, why is it so difficult for the US to pressure Switzerland through threats of trade embargo, etc. to get this money but in a matter of months we can invade poor countries and waste billions of dollars. If we treated tax cheats the way we treat drug users and dealers in this country it would be such a problem.
wouldnt** sorry
As of right now, the US has convinced the Swiss to give up some of its banking records. I don't know if any country successfully has done that before. And a trade embargo... please. Unless you can convince everyone else in Europe to go along with it, it has no chance of succeeding.
Indeed. The Swiss are mightily pissed at UBS for capitulating to US pressure over the banking secrecy. My wife, who is swiss, has sworn never to bank with them, and apparently so has most of her family.
Here's the last thing I`ll say on this-just because the Swiss have these views on banking secrecy does not mean they are correct-these are potentially billions in funds owed to our country to support programs our people need-I could really give a flying F what the Swiss-who up until very recently would not release Holocaust victims funds to their relatives-have to say about banking secrecy. Also, trade embargo is one threat of a dozen or so you can throw out there I understand it may sound extreme.
If that was the extent of it, then I wouldn't have too much of a problem. Essentially helping somebody in the black market file their income from something illegal and making it taxable. I would bet a lot of CPAs would give advice on that as well. However, you need to have warning bells go off when somebody is talking about underage prostitution. I mean calling the police type of warning bells.
I kept hoping it would turn out one of the Acornettes had called the FBI and was working on an entrapment deal--"Child pimpers! They came to my office! I played along; you've gotta take them down when they come back! I'll wear a wire; please!" But no.
As for rich people cheating on their taxes, it's widely accepted that people at all income levels try to cheat on their taxes. (It pays better for the IRS to go after the big fish and collect $1 million rather than Joe the Plumber and collect $1000.) I just don't see where someone having a swiss bank account gets Acorn off the hook.
This is being treated as a much bigger deal than it actually is. I will attempt to illustrate by way of analogy. Before I went back to school I worked with teenagers at a group home. The nonprofit I worked for contracted with the state social services department to provide care for kids in a variety of situations. We had group homes, we kept up with kids who were living at home but needed extra support, and we had a few juvenile detention facilities as well. The organization did worthy work, and it was a tough but rewarding job. Doing informal counseling and behavior management with this population is tough. It requires training, experience and instinct to get right. I probably made a few missteps in working with the kids but I know I never did anything that I later regretted as immoral. Most of my coworkers were the same. We weren't perfect but we cared about the kids and tried to do our best by them. We did good, necessary work.
However, about ten years before I started there, an employee of the nonprofit aided two girls in escaping from a juvenile detention facility. She was found with the underage girls, supposedly in a hotel room with drugs and alcohol, and arrested on kidnapping charges. She could still be in jail for the offense as far as I know. Are we to conclude that the entire nonprofit is corrupt because of our rogue employee's acts? And what does this have to do with the president of the United States?
Granted, there are multiple ACORN employees involved in this scandal. But I'm assuming ACORN employs tens of thousands of community workers, and I don't think a rational person can judge the entire organization by the acts of a few. By that logic our military is hopelessly corrupt because a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib took the frat pranks a little too far.*
*I adopted the right-wing response to Abu Ghraib for the sake of argument. Of course we all know that the torture techniques on display at Abu Ghraib were part of a coordinated torture regime implemented at the highest levels of the executive branch, complete with unconscionable rubberstamping courtesy of OLC.
I was dismissive of all these allegations as well, during the campaign at any rate. I thought ACORN was the cons' red herring--and as far as Obama is concerned, I think it still is--but the fact that these people are among the first people representing ACORN in offices across the country is more than a little troubling, given their considerable funding from the government. If anything, this shows what little accountability government funded non-profs have and how feckless oversight of funding is. I mean, really, these two "activist-actors" are hardly convincing, and these nuts fall for it. Have you SEEN the CA video? She is either an insane liar or a murderer being supported by the government thanks to well-connected activist-lobbyists.
Corruption and bad practices hit a few large companies' ceo's and boards and people call it endemic to capitalism, while most businesses are well-run, respectable, and filled with decent people. Meanwhile organizations--public, private, and non-profit alike--who live off the public teet overseen by an inattentive, self-interested Congress who pass out more money for failure than success somehow are isolated incidents and not reflective of a political spoils system that breeds corruption and ineptitude, reflected in all of American and, to a larger and less direct extent, centuries of world history.
I'm a little late but a couple of points I think are worth noting: The Acorn staffer in the San Bernadino office was "playing" the so-called reporters, who, if they (and their Fox news enablers) were really journalists would have made a call to the local police dept. to find out if in fact there had been a murder.
Our nation's entire economy was nearly tanked by the bad practices and corruption of a whole lot more than a "few" large companies. Having worked in govt. as well for some of the world's largest corporations, I know its not constructive to paint either with a broad brush, good or bad. You can find both in healthy or unhealthy amounts in the private and the public sector.
But following your analogy, multiple torturers at Abu Ghraib was taken to mean that the military had serious, top-down issues that needed to be addressed.
I read this comment from one "Michael Turner" over on Marc Cooper's blog and, while I haven't watched more than a snip of those videos, it seems like as rational explanation for what was on the "ACORN tape" as anything else:
Has anybody actually watched those videos? Here’s what happens: a guy walks in with a woman dressed as a hooker, and he tells a puzzled staffer that he’s in law school, and he wants to run for political office, but he’s facing discrimination by banks in this business he wants to get into: running a whorehouse. These ACORN staffers are clearly bored, and decided to have a little fun with them. (At one point, the staffer even criticizes the banks for being “liberals”, “bleeding hearts”, too politically correct, not open-minded enough.)
They play along, because it’s hilarious. At one point, the staffer says that maybe voters will be more accepting of how this guy earns his campaign funds from underage prostitution if he has the girls on 401(k) plans.
The video gets played by Fox, as if it were in dead earnest. Well, who looks stupid here? Anybody who takes these charges seriously after seeing the videos, and anybody who thinks they can just take a Fox headline like “Shocking revelations from ACORN worker in California” at face value, and don’t have to watch the videos to make up their own mind.
But stupidest of all? Anybody who watches these videos and thinks that ACORN was officially offering advice in dead earnest to a young guy walking in with a women who the staffer first guessed must be a “stripper”, who complains of lending discimination just because he wants a housing loan to set up a whorehouse, and openly admits to wanting to use the funds for financing a political campaign.
(Later)
Oh, and my contribution above? That was before I saw the FOX News clip where the staffer tells the video crew that “everyone in town” knew that she had shot her abusive husband to death, AND then Glenn Beck pretending (rather elaborately) that he actually *believes* her.
Or is Beck as stupid and gullible as his audience? Can’t rule it out, no, not these days. (end)
Note: This isn't my comment, but I found it interesting and wonder if anyone who has actually watched those tapes has had the same thought or thinks it could be what was going on when two oddly dressed white folks with a bizarre and elaborate story walked into the Baltimore ACORN office.
I have to watch the full videos still, but I saw that white boy on tv this morning, and I find it hard to believe that anyone could take him seriously as a pimp.
RACIST!!!!YOU LIE!!!
Sorry haha
Smiley face.
And now the woman from the San Bernardino office is claiming she played along because this couple was so scary:
http://www.sbsun.com/breakingnews/ci_13342536
Of course. That's where the stupidity comes in.
If it was only one video, sure. But I think the tally is 4 now, and it's pretty much the same story everywhere.
"Same story everywhere" - but which story ? I still haven't seen the videos, but apparently the woman who told them that everybody knew she killed her husband didn't really kill her husband, so I'm not convinced there couldn't be a put-on factor here.
Really, don't we have larger things to focus on than a fake prostitute not paying her taxes?
Disclosure: I bought my first home last year, and I benefited from an ACORN program.
I find it disheartening how readily people will accept the need to shut down this entire organization based on the actions of a handful of its employees. Name me an organization that doesn't have some lunkheads working for it.
I understand that this is damaging the president, but shouldn't helping people trump political expediency?
GG,
love the shirts.
But seriously, it is less damaging for Obama than the organization as a whole. But I don't think "lunkheads" is the proper term for people who aid and abet underage sex slavery. I mean, they say on the tapes "13 very young Salvadorean girls"--and ACORN tells them to file those kids as "dependents." Really? Lunkheads?
If Southern sympathizers started calling 1850s slave traders and raping masters "lunkheads" I think we'd all be pretty p.o.'d, and rightfully so. Helping out underage sex traffickers goes well beyond any acceptable qualification of simply "poor decision making."
Good post, but just a minor correction: ACORN bit on this three times, not twice.
Correction: As TW Andrews writes above, and the NY Times reports, it's 4 videos so far. That's cold-blooded, dripping those videos out like that. I like it. They let ACORN claim that the one office was just an outlier and then the rest of the combination hits.
Yeah. Lunkheads, degenerates, whatever.
Someone is going to have to explain to me why these incidents invalidate the valuable work this organization does.
It's like saying that a country should immediately disband its army because some of its soldiers are accused of rape.
This whole story is akin to letting children dictate the terms of a debate.
I've seen reports that say Acorn has received $56 million in taxpayer money over the past 15 years. Anybody know if that is correct? That seems like a very small amount of money we're talking about, considering how much coverage Acorn gets on Fox News.
This situation is just the 21st century version of Reagan's Cadillac-driving welfare queen. God forbid an organization helping regular people (including some poor, brown folks) access their government's services screws up - meanwhile HalliburtonBlackwaterKBR continue to get $billions in federal contracts despite massive incompetent and illegal behavior (ya know, like raping/killing people).
Help me, I'm getting the vapours!!
This. The real problem is that ACORN = Obama in the crazies minds and the media's running with it instead of taking the time to investigate and look at facts. Same old story.
How many Republicans (and democrats) have had to resign for soliciting prostitutes, taking bribes, or all manner of illegal activities. It doesn't mean the entire government and all politicians are corrupt/immoral (though of course it warrants further scrutiny)
Just a couple of questions, for anyone who thinks these pranks are newsworthy:
1. If you were an ACORN rep, and someone came into your office dressed exceedingly strangely (i.e., WASPs dressed in Superfly costumes) with a bizarre and frankly unbelievable story, to the point where you suspected you were being wound up, what would you do?
2. How likely is it that the ACORN reps in the video believed that the actors were for real?
3. What possible basis would there be for any inference regarding how ACORN services its real-life clients, based on these staged interactions?
1. Even if you humor yourself, which the people in the vids show very little if any signs of doing, at some point, where it gets morally reprehensible, you stop playing along. My personal line lays somewhere between government sponsored tax evasion and child sex slavery. call me crazy.
2. see 1.
3. What part of taxpayer-funded child prostitution tax shelters was unclear?
I am ready to join in on the condemnation of what happened in these ACORN offices, but first, I have a question based on what I've just read.
Were the ACORN workers who met with the fake pimp and partner given an opportunity to either discuss their concerns with their managers, or contact law enforcement, before the investigation ended? It is actually somewhat reasonable that an interviewer would "play along" during the interview: it's what happened soon after that would be more important.