Following on Rachel Maddow’s tremendous coverage last Thursday of the GOP’s years-long witch-hunt of ACORN, and the media’s abysmal job at telling the truth about the lies used to smear the community organization, the MSNBC journalist calls it an “outrage” and kept her promise of following up with another episode on Friday. The video is below.
We welcome her coverage of so much of what we have been reporting, sometimes almost completely alone, for years, and as further detailed now by a new academic study titled “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong.”
Maddow continued her long-overdue exposé, by examining the “Defund ACORN Act of 2009,” which recently passed both houses of Congress by large margins, after sting videos showing low-level ACORN employees behaving stupidly (but breaking no laws) were created and posted by rightwing operatives. As she notes, the Congressional bill appears to be both unconstitutional, and incredibly hypocritical, given that other, still-federally funded organizations — such as Halliburton, Blackwater, and many, many more — often receive far more federal funding in a single day than ACORN has received during the organization’s entire lifetime.
Furthermore, those other organizations, which still receive billions from the U.S. government, were actually found to have committed actual crimes, such as millions of dollars worth of fraud, have been charged with murder and the deaths of U.S. troops, and even involve child prostitution and sex slavery!
It’s odd that Fox “News,” Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, et al. (including the bulk of the non-wingnut media!) have yet to point these matters out, isn’t it? So thanks to Maddow, again, for doing so, along with credit to both Joe Conason, who pointed out some of this hypocrisy recently at Salon and, yes, ourselves, who similarly opined at the UK’s Guardian.
Be sure to see her must-watch Thursday report back here. Her Friday report follows below, along with our repeated “thank you” to Rachel, and offer to help on any number of still-unreported points in the continuing GOP witch-hunt that both the media and Democrats have embarrassingly fallen for, and about which we have been reporting for years…
UPDATE 9/29/09: The third report in Maddow’s must-see series is now posted here…
{Ed Note: Uncited, disinformation deleted. JupiterSuite, please see our rules for posting comments at BRAD BLOG. Thanks! – BF}
“Well yes, you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize the right wing’s glee over ACORN’s latest troubles and not to believe that many of its critics would refrain from attacking a conservative organization implicated in similar conduct. So what. ACORN’s lack of integrity is not excused or ameliorated by the advantages Republicans derive from it.â€
Wake up.
More here: http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/wendy_kaminer/2009/09/acorn_a_cautionary_tale.php.
“Wake up”? To what Jupe? The fact that the wingnuts don’t actually give a damn about corruption by federally-funded organizations, unless they believe they can receive a political advantage by keeping legal voters from voting in the process of acting like they do?
{Ed Note: Obnoxious, sexist comment deleted. – BF}
COMMENT #2 [Permalink]
… JupiterSuite said on 9/28/2009 @ 2:23 pm PT…
“Well yes, you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize the right wing’s glee over ACORN’s latest troubles and not to believe that many of its critics would refrain from attacking a conservative organization implicated in similar conduct. So what. ACORN’s lack of integrity is not excused or ameliorated by the advantages Republicans derive from it.â€
Wake up.
You’d have to be an idiot not to believe that many of ACORN’s critics would refrain from attacking a conservative organization implicated in similar conduct?
Why? Why is it “OK” or “normal” for ACORN critics not to criticize conservative organizations engaged in much more quantity and amount of $$$ corruption than ACORN? Why do you say that?
Then you say: “So what?”???????????? So what? If no one cares about conservative organizations engaged in much more corruption and at greater taxpayer money?
So what??????????
Are you insane? Making statements like that?
So what?????????????????
Federal Contractor Misconduct Database
ACORN and the top recipients of government contracts among companies guilty of serious misconduct.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VizIrBQwA8w/SsCaFLaeGnI/AAAAAAAAHaM/oY-Kc5E2wJo/s1600-h/acorn1.jpg
http://www.contractormisconduct.org/
O.K. the interests of the American people are not being represented by the people in Congress to a large extent. When the elections come, they have to go. We are getting ripped off financially while they sit and get fat off the crooked corporations. The problem is “us”. This is our country, not the Congresses’ country. We are going to take it back.
I’m not so sure that the bill is un-constitutional. It specifically says it can be referred to as “the Acorn bill”, but when it gets to the actual language it just talks about organizations and people who have defrauded the government. I think it would be a real test, since it passed overwhelmingly in both houses, if it arrived on President Obama’s desk…
just when you thought glenns ratings couldn’t get any worse, they do!!!!
19 More Advertisers Ditch Glenn Beck
James RuckerFounder of ColorOfChange.org
Posted: October 6, 2009 02:00 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-rucker/19-more-advertisers-ditch_b_311256.html
Is Rupert Murdoch going to fire this sap?