Perhaps you heard of the group ACORN? They were a community organizing group that was driven out of existence after congress bought into a fraud perpetrated by James O'Keefe, Andrew Breitbart, and FOX news, and cut their funding.
See according to the fraud, ACORN was providing homes for underage child trafficker's, prostitutes, drug dealers and helping fake tax forms to cover it up as well as voter registration fraud (in favor of Obama) in the 2008 election, the alleged impetus for the tapes . Now of course NONE of that is true, it was all due to doctored tapes, as multiple investigations have shown from various state, federal and independent groups.
In fact, no one has found a single illegal thing ACORN did ever. But that didnt matter, since the media (read FOX) was off and running with the story. Which lead to the vote in the House of Representatives that was 345-75 in favor of defunding ACORN. It was this vote which lead to the group having to shut down as they lost too much money.
And again, keep in mind, as has been proven over the last 3 years they did NOTHING wrong.
And yet so far, all the people involved in this fraud have more or less continued on with life as Normal.
FOX News is still FOX news, and while there ratings are at a 12 year low, they seem to escaped taking a reputation hit for airing doctored footage. In fact if you remember when the White House tried to limit FOX's access to them, in part because of this, the other media companies defended FOX.
Andrew Breitbart, who paid for the production of the footage meanwhile has passed away, but before his death, he also perpetrated the Shirley Sherrod Hoax, in which he again doctored tapes to make it seem as if Mrs Sherrod has said something other then what she had, leading to her firing. At the time of his death he was working on a big release (later released by the website he founded Breitbart.com) of a "secret" tape of the president hugging a terrorist (and by terrorist they meant a random college professor breitbart pretended was a terrorist). Even after his death his associates at Breitbart.com were the ones responsible for the completely false and made up story about Sec of Defense Chuck Hagel taking donations from a group called "Friends of Hamas" which didnt exist, but which did play a role in the history making filibuster against him.
In case you havnt noticed, the Right Wing media tends not to learn from their mistakes, they will trust anything that agrees with what they really really wish was true even if 5 seconds of thought would disprove it.
And lastly we have the Camera-man himself, James O'keefe. Now to be fair, O'Keefe IS a convicted criminal, due to his attempts to break into Senator Mary Landrieu's office. But up till now he hasnt actually gotten into trouble for all the frauds he's attempted.
See like his patron, he didnt just stop at the ACORN fraud, O'Keefe also did a "sting" on NPR as well, and of doctoring the tapes to get the desired conversation even if it wasnt what was really said. He was also taped trying and (unbeknownst to him failing) to commit voter fraud in the New Hampshire Primary, although no changes were filed. And lastly he tried to tape the NY census workers training others to commit fraud. As with his other videos he edited it. Unlike his other videos however it never really saw the light of day, since unknown to anyone the NY census department was secretly taping its own training sessions, and they had an unedited tape before O'Keefe had ever finished editing his version.
The thing with O'keefe so far had been, though luck and skill he had managed to avoid any real legal trouble for the ACORN fraud. Basically what he's been doing is providing the unedited tapes to prosecutors investigating ACORN's alleged frauds, in exchange for immunity.
And of course in every case his tape exonerated ACORN from the investigation his fraud started. But no one has been able to go after him. Until now.
Juan Carlos Vera was one of the ACORN employee's O'Keefe ran his fraud on. In Vera's case O'Keefe claimed he needed a safe house to smuggle in underage child prostitutes into the country and needed ACORN's help to get cheap housing. Now on the edited version of the tape Vera seemed open to the idea and discussed exactly what kind of house O'keefe needed to complete his smuggling ring and gave him some paper work to fill out.
In the unedited version however Vera says he cant help, nor can ACORN, but offers to put O'keefe in contact with his "cousin" who helps run a child smuggling ring, and after getting info on what O'keefe needs gives him the "cousins" business card.
Which still sounds pretty damning, until you discover Vera's "cousin" is actually a friend of his who was an undercover police officer working on a task force to stop child smuggling. In other words Vera was assisting the cops and trying to get what he believed to be a child smuggler to [unknowingly] turn himself in.
And for that he got fired. Or well for what O'keefe edited it to look like he was fired. So now he's suing. And since O'keefe had already turned over the unedited tapes to avoid previous prosecution, he had no way out of this one.
Which means for the first time since the ACORN fraud was pulled off, he actually DID have some consequence. Sadly it was only $100,000 in an out of court settlement. But at least its a start.
For there part, the Republican Party is in such denial about this whole event, they cant even admit this happened, let alone anything else.
Far from admitting they got scammed and/or conned repeatedly by these people (sherrod, NPR, Friends of Hamas and this), the GOP has just decided to break from reality.
5 days ago the GOP passed a continuing resolution to keep the government running. The following sentence is included in Section 510, on page 221:
"None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors."
ACORN no longer exists, for going on 3 years now. So yea, they just passed a provision to not fund a non existent entity.....
But I guess when you spend the last 3 years getting rolled over and over and over and over and over and over and over again by the same guys the only thing you can do is pretend it didnt happen.
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