And ACORN bounces right back!

Good news recently for Americans who care about Democracy, Justice, and the Constitution:

Congress’ Bill To Punish ACORN Ruled Unconstitutional!

“Bills of Attainder,” which the Constitution forbids, are acts of Congress that are specifically designed to single out a particular person or party for punishment.  The reason our Founding Fathers prohibited this practice is that Congress is a legislative body, not bound to follow any of the due process procedures guaranteed in a judicial proceeding.  As Glennzilla writes, “During the reign of abusive Kings, [the Bill of Attainder] was a favorite instrument for enabling unpopular parties to be convicted, punished and deprived without benefit of a trial… It virtually ensures that, as happened here, guilt will be imposed due to political passions and a lynch mob mentality rather than a careful and fair examination of evidence.  It also leaves weak and unpopular parties far more vulnerable to punishment.”  The unfamiliarity or indifference of most of Congress to the founding document they are sworn to uphold is well illustrated in this wonderful Grayson video:

This of course didn’t stop Congressional Republicans (simply acting in their own cynical interests against an organization that registers more Democrats than Republicans to vote, as the poor are not all morons) along with a sizable chunk of contemptible spineless Democrats (whose first reaction to any sign of political danger is to run screaming from their powerless allies who need their help most) from duly passing an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder, punishing ACORN for the Scumbag Video Scandal which was then taking Fox News by storm, stripping  the group of the modest federal funding it had been getting.  (A few million in comparison with the trillions we’ve been shelling out to Wall Street crooks, or the hundreds of billions to fraudulent defense contractors like Halliburton.)

Well, Federal District Judge Nina Gershon has knocked that churro right down! To those who try to claim that stripping funding from a group is not a “punishment,” she retorts:

“Wholly apart from the vociferous comments by various members of Congress as to ACORN’s criminality and fraud . . . no reasonable observer could suppose that such severe action would have been taken in the absence of a conclusion that misconduct occurred.”  The court pointed to numerous statements made by Senators, including the bill’s primary sponsor (Sen. Johanns), in which they anointed themselves judge and jury to declare ACORN guilty of crimes with which they had not even been charged, let alone convicted. Relying on Lovett — which held unconstitutional a Congressional act banning specified individuals from government employment based on the unadjudicated finding that they had “subversive beliefs” and “subversive associations” — Judge Gershon explained that under clear Supreme Court law:  “the discretionary nature of government funding does not foreclose a finding that Congress has impermissibly singled out plaintiffs for punishment.”

We await the usual bleats from rightwing circles of “judicial activism,” which are to be expected any and every time a judge takes an action they don’t like.  OJ blogger Terry Crowley is comforting himself on the floor of his cabin right now by mumbling that even though current contracts must go through, there will be no new ones;  given Democrats’ general cravenness he may be right but we’ll see.   And this ruling comes on top of the finding by Massachusetts’ Attorney General that ACORN is completely innocent in the matter of the Scumbag Prostitution Video Scandal:

Mass. AG report finds ACORN innocent in Scumbag Video Sting

Yes, I know this report was commissioned by ACORN, but that is what an organization has to do when under a cloud of scandal not of their own making, and no chance to prove their innocence in court since no charges are being brought!  So they commissioned an investigator with impeccable credentials – Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, who was highly qualified for the job, having “presided over Common Cause, the nation’s leading political reform advocacy group, as well as overseen numerous investigations at the local and state level during his long career in public service.”

And as Joe Conason points out in Salon, the report Harshbarger produced was no whitewash, as it contends the videos “represent the byproduct of ACORN’s long-standing management weaknesses, including a lack of training, a lack of procedures and a lack of onsite supervision,” and sets forth “nine detailed recommendations for improved performance that Harshbarger says the organization must implement immediately” in order to “meet the expectations and requirements of the stakeholders who supported and benefited from its advocacy and service work.”

Yet the Harshbarger report concludes that, far from ACORN itself being culpable of any wrongdoing, “we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff;  in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers.”  Harshbarger’s team came to these conclusions by doing what America’s lazy journalists should have done in the first place: interviewing ACORN employees, and reviewing the videos and the transcripts over at BigGovernment, the propaganda website run by rightwing activist Andrew Breitbart, who is the scumbag behind scumbag pranksters James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.  And what he found should embarrass anyone who took those videos seriously:

Examining the Scumbag Video Sting

Throughout the long hot summer of 2009, O’Keefe and Giles (heretofore and hereafter referred to  as “the scumbags”) traversed this vast nation going from ACORN office to ACORN office, trying to find an employee whom they could entrap into giving them help or advice on, let’s see, what is the yuckiest… I know, a scam involving child prostitution, illegal immigration, welfare and tax fraud!  How many offices did they go to before they had something they felt they could rush to Fox News with?  We’ll never know, because information of that sort is not convenient to their case.  We do know that even the videos we’ve all seen were not convincing enough as they stood because they turn out to have been doctored.  Let’s see what else we know:

Scumbag Follies #1:  San Bernardino, California

When our scumbags showed up at ACORN’s San Bernardino office and tried their pimp-n-whore shtick on organizer Tresa Kaelke, she knew right away that they were full of sh*t (although not that they were filming her) so she decided to mess with them by fabricating a whole story about how she had killed her ex-husband.  Or as she put it later,

“They were not believable. … Somewhat entertaining, but they weren’t even good actors.  I didn’t know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.   Like Stephen Colbert does — saying the most outrageous things with a straight face.” ACORN’s  press release continues:  “When the actors approached Ms. Kaelke with their provocative costuming and outlandish scenario, she could not take the m seriously.  So she met their outrageousness with her own personal style of outrageousness.  She matched their false scenario with her own false scenarios.”

In fact Ms. Kaelke’s ex-husband is alive and well, as SB police confirmed.  But naturally our two intrepid scumbags bought the tale lock, stock and barrel, and rushed it to FOX News, who duly ran with it for a week (as documented for posterity in this Media Matters montage.)  Once they found out they were duped, FOX naturally just dropped the story without explanation or apology, as we have come to expect of that fine “news” organization:

Scumbag Follies #2:  San Diego, California

This is evidently the best they could do in San Diego, but they considered it a success as well.   As you can see, the two try their best to get an incriminating response from a worker who doesn’t speak much Eengleesh, and as Harshbarger notes, “his participation amounts mostly to nodding or saying ‘OK.’ It is difficult to determine what this employee is responding to because the videographers’ statements are obscured by a voiceover inserted later.”

Unbeknownst to our scumbag duo, on their departure this caballero immediately called up a cousin of his in the local police to get advice about a possible human smuggling ring he had discovered.  Police reports confirm that officers followed up and determined the whole thing to be a ruse.  Yet the scumbags consider this heavily redacted tape a success!

Scumbag Follies #3:  Philadelphia

We also know that the ACORN folks in Philadelphia called the cops on the scumbags, who didn’t manage to even get enough video there to massage into something like their San Diego triumph.  Still Harshbarger notes that for some reason  “some of the released videos contain scenes of the sign of the Philadelphia ACORN office and shots of Philadelphia’s head organizer with no audio.”

Scumbag Follies #4:  Even video of the scumbag Dupes had to be doctored!

As we all know, our scumbag adventurers finally found a couple of ACORN workers, in Baltimore, to (apparently) give them advice to help them with some very unsavory and illegal activities, and those workers were duly fired.  But it seems even THOSE videos were not dramatic or incriminating enough and needed to be highly edited with the scumbags’ statements and questions overdubbed, so we really have no way of knowing exactly what was said.  And naturally the scumbags refuse to let anyone see the original, unedited videos, and have refused to answer any questions from Harshbarger, who can only note:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

Hence Joe Conason’s conclusion that the scumbag videos should be considered propaganda and not journalism (and obviously legal evidence of absolutely nothing.)  And one more thing – if any of you Orange Juice readers ever read anything Terry Crowley writes here, bear in mind all of the above, along with his constant references to “the Pro-Child-Prostitution ACORN” to gauge his distance from truth and reality.

Merry Christmas To All, and To All A Good NUT!