FBI busts Acorn sting schmuck
TPM Muckraker is still breaking this story, but I cannot wait to hear how Fox News covers this one (or if it ends up on the spike like their Haiti coverage).
More.
[T]he FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O’Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group’s credibility.
Also arrested were Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, all 24. Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the office confirmed. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.
According to the FBI affidavit, Flanagan and Basel entered the federal building at 500 Poydras Street about 11 a.m. Monday, dressed as telephone company employees, wearing jeans, fluorescent green vests, tool belts, and hard hats. When they arrived at Landrieu’s 10th floor office, O’Keefe was already in the office and had told a staffer he was waiting for someone to arrive.
When Flanagan and Basel entered the office, they told the staffer they were there to fix phone problems. At that time, the staffer, referred to only as Witness 1 in the affadavit, observed O’Keefe positioning his cell phone in his hand to videotape the operation. O’Keefe later admitted to agents that he recorded the event.
After being asked, the staffer gave Basel access to the main phone at the reception desk. The staffer told investigators that Basel manipulated the handset. He also tried to call the main office phone using his cell phone, and said the main line wasn’t working. Flanagan did the same.
They then told the staffer they needed to perform repair work on the main phone system and asked where the telephone closet was located. The staffer showed the men to the main General Services Administration office on the 10th floor, and Flanagan and Basel went in. There, a GSA employee asked for the men’s credentials, after which they stated they left them in their vehicle.
The U.S. Marshal’s Service apprehended all four men shortly thereafter.
Speaking as someone who owns almost a hundred books on Nixon and Watergate, this is so freaking similar to the Watergate break-in (right down to the ineptitude) it’s startling. How on earth could they have thought they were committing a legal act?
Oh, and this break-in was sponsored by the Pelican Institute.
I know O’Keefe won’t end up in Angola State Prison, but I can dream, can’t I?
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Orwellian corruption, hacks and horrorshows:
Did Tom Rogers topple Abramoff’s slush fund/corruption ring?
Palin’s extremist supporters “rebel” against her campaigning for John McCain
Texas Education Board confuses “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” author with DePaul Marxist, bans popular children’s books from their elementary curricula
Halliburton/KBR smear rape victim (which is, after all, 100% consistent with their mission statement to do everything in their power to make this world a stinking hellhole)
More on sports radio political talk
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What will these people do when they wake up one morning and realize that authentic teabaggers have no skill sets, and no clue how to raise money or organize events?
They honestly seem to have no clue how totally their movement has been orchestrated.
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Imprisoning 78-year-olds for nonviolent protest: yes, we really have sunk that low.
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It had to happen eventually, but it looks like a priest was falsely accused and convicted of pederasty in Massachusetts.
Why?
Because a judge and jury bought into the bullshit (and universally rejected) theory of repressed memories, or how to make a living when you’re a crappy psychologist with a heavy agenda based on your personal sense of having been politically/sexually oppressed.
What does this have to do with politics?
In late 2004, shortly before his trial the next year, Coakley’s office offered Shanley a deal: plead guilty to one minor charge and receive sentence of time served, plus two and a half years’ house arrest. Shanley declined. “I’m 74 years old”, he told me from prison after he was convicted; “why would I take a deal?” But “can you imagine”, he added, “here I am, the worst monster, a danger to children everywhere, and they offer me time served? Seven months [the time he’d spent in jail awaiting bail]. But for refusing to lie, I got twelve to fifteen years.”
Father Shanley was a homosexual, and yes, he had sex with young men. Not teens, and certainly not children. Prosecutors made up lies and relied on barbaric and disproven psychological hogwash to put him in prison.
Massachusetts seems to be especially inclined to accept repressed memories in court. That’s fucked up.
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Apparently Tim Pawlenty unalotted $269 out of my pocket last year.
But that’s not a tax increase.
In some hyperlegalistic sense and even then, yes, it’s a tax increase.
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Just dumping the rest of the links here because I want to quick get this posted before everyone hears about O’Keefe’s sudden retirement from the world of politics.
Bill Scher on Barack Hoover Obama
Rick Perry eschews newspaper endorsements (wise move as there’s no reason for any of them to endorse his sorry-assed administration)
Geithner was going to use national security to keep the AIG bailout plan secret?
Radiation ODs: not just for Chernobyl anymore
Sorry to hear that Steve Rapp’s gone from being a decent populist Dem to just another bagman for torture
County Fair on Glenn Beck and teh stupid
LA Times blogger Andrew Malcolm admits to being a partisan
More on that Senate majority thing we didn’t lose last week
Rachel Maddow did a segment on the freeze last night before I’d even heard there was going to be one.
Political incompetence coming to light
Scott Brown’s website still doesn’t admit that he’s a Republican
If you served in Iraq, read this
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Me being cranky:
Imagine it’s 1988 and the German and Japanese economies are still in a shambles because aggressive Allied occupiers are focused on keeping a lid on overpopulated refugee camps to the point of denying medical care or even letting supplies in.
Or it’s today and the U.S. is still in South Vietnam and will be until at least 2018.
Gaza is an ongoing war crime. Ellison’s letter to Obama is as minimal as it gets.
Obama should sign a treaty with Gaza and then send in troops to protect their border.
Before I die, I would like this country to just once militarily intervene on behalf of human beings, and not to protect corporate interests.
Just once.
Now we are talking about the carcass with such force it takes every sense.
Not to put the low time, now is the time to get high on it and dream creation but., fucking ejh jah eh…(and all the other sounds that work ) cool.. I like the new format or at least your current flow.. You have certainly been writing a bit more and then going there with the manic links. Go there. Go there, go there…pondering why you link seems to be with and in air/nutrition/and just WTF and why invest in the more with and of the same.
Come as you are and bring the fucking baggage too…always running never enough mortar touching earth. Own your block! Fuck hope! Links are links almost like popcorn so warm and fuzzy …pop.. Pop…. ..pop…pop……reinforcement of limitless oil and heat….! I feel/think that way too! AND?
Then the then…
. ..Analysis of what is “happening” and more delicately just how to orchestrate a jubilee, certainly on the fibers of recycled electrons when the lights go out all the while writing?
We might be dead but why not start thinking/accepting just as the wave knows natural calm.
Got what 4 5 6 8 senses? How about 30?
As goes section 168 thus goes the next push. Who knows WHAT DOES NOT WORK might get lucky and actually have the angst of rhetoric cellular magic. Teeth and then the skin actually come home and spin the labor OF SOME ENTIRELY NEW CLOTH.
Fucking humans, and the consciousness, and the flesh. It is so there.
Imagine all the walls that “perfect humans” and “decades perspective” have already lost to only claim: comfort.
Sense indeed senseless . Ready to die?
Nope, not here either!
And so we build what we build. Here have some links. Print them out and pretend someone thinks like you?! @xMx.blog
Go figure it is true. But
All
Is
And
It is tied and all tied up. And this is no bowline knot true and as fast as it holds any circle….always ready to be untied. This fucker is way too vested to come undone. Tie a few more knots after the knot? Now, now…just improvise and use the line before knot and after the knot to close the distance. It is news!
How is that working out for you?
The fourteen year old “first time drunk” (technology toys and all) boy scouts procreated with the scout masters wives. Look at the knots?! Had to happen or could of, of, of, of, this or that…jjjjjjjUstT be reformed a bit like or to fit this or that? If only we had the news! We certainly have some tools.
WTF? Everyone is looking to create a new merit badge. Why not just get “naked” and ponder just why it is so many feel so attached to so little.
Almost… if you bend structure primary to “known” order it almost feels safe. like a century and a half of true steel and all the energy behind ideas that are going to bring “us” to a new world needing more soil and toil but, but ,but, we have new tools?! Got the bridge baby needsssssS some food! Reach really, relax them drone masters need some hands.
Go figure the USA! I love it myself! I do think we are tired but ready to break more than a few bones if we actually use our muscles…the tendons will hold. Pain is relative and deadly.
OR
Keep looking at the knots that leave it all behind your time in a bind. And everyday more of the same. Something tells me, if upon a pinnacle balance you know as do your readers….IDEAS not the NEWS!
There is no news
We are going about here somewhere, it is section 168 waterfall after all (bring a chamber pot as we are civilized) . Everyone (well not really, ultimately their choice) is welcome and go figure it works out like a twenty minute daydream with instant REM sleep but you never sleep and we are just here to be section 168. Plenty of no/yes/no time to ponder one section of the stadium taking the field and creating a whole new game. It is pretty helmet -less , painful/dead/even ….for the trying, at times environment but if you know/see it you will feel right at home. There is still plenty of seating. No newspapers only crazy bleached newsprint with some words!
So a bit more writing please, even if you only see the game from the box seats or ON your TV set.
$123,689,769,498,576,473,645,343,545,654,934.00. Almost now is the time to leave it all behind and start writing about the effort it will take to build some shit and not in the political sense.
Life is good.
Time has three lessons:
Buy it once and save to do so, in the mean time you can do without
Build it
Now is not the sort of thing that has historical reference
Opps!
Four
How do we get from here to there when new tools are ever more forcefully used to maintain the past.?
Nope no link think it.
ready comes latter
as though anyone seated in section 168 was here for anything other than yes.
Angry, peaceful, motherfuckers, day by day without a chamber pot to piss in.
Get high.. We will be dead but there is no other way.
Have a seat.
A 900-word comment?
OK, I’m invoking the Harvard maximum length rules they implemented after Kissinger bludgeoned them with his 354-page doctoral thesis.
PUSH….
ok then. OK
You have some tolls Mark
ok then. OK