Author: David Weigel

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is encouraging members of its email list (4 million strong) to join a “Fact Check Fox” campaign today, letting them debunk/get debunkings of Fox News spin on the State of the Union. According to DCCC spokesman Ryan Rudominer, it’s a bow to the response the committee gets when going after conservatives.

“We saw our membership go through roof when Palin made her death panel smear,” said Rudominer. “Now that she’s actually on Fox as a pundit, it’s even more of a reason to swing back.”

The email:

Thank you for renewing your 2010 membership in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Your commitment to fighting for the President’s vision for America’s future and the Democratic Party’s agenda for change, confirms my firm belief that we’re going to have the resources to contest every seat in 2010 and be fully prepared for these crucial midterm elections.

Because of your dedication to the DCCC, I am personally inviting you to join our State of the Union “Fact Check FOX” Team.

Join our mobile “Fact Check FOX” rapid response team by using your mobile phone to text DCCC to 35328 or clicking here to sign up (standard message rates apply).

This group of Democratic Party activists will stand at the ready to counter the lies and distortions that erupt from the rightwing media and Republican spin doctors like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck following President Obama’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night. You will receive rapid response fact check text alerts and a direct line to our Rapid Response team to tell us when you see Republican pundits and Members of Congress twisting the truth.

If you don’t have a cell phone, you can also send in your “Fact Check Fox” reports to our rapid response team at [email protected], or via Facebook or Twitter.

This initiative of the DCCC’s Rapid Response Network is an essential component of our 2010 campaign strategy.

It’s this dedicated army of grassroots activists that gives us the capacity to counter the right wing’s massive propaganda machine.

Join our mobile “Fact Check FOX” rapid response team by using your mobile phone to text DCCC to 35328 or clicking here to sign up.

Thank you again for your generous support. It’s clear evidence that grassroots Democrats reject the doom and gloom scenarios spun by rightwing media pundits about the Democratic Party’s agenda. Working together I know we can achieve the change we voted for in 2008.

Thank you,

Jon Vogel
DCCC Executive Director

P.S. I need to recruit 5,000 new members to our “Fact Check Fox” Team by midnight tonight. Can I count on you? We need to stand together to counter the misleading statements and outright lies of the Republican media machine. Join our mobile “Fact Check FOX” rapid response team by using your mobile phone to text DCCC to 35328 or clicking here to sign.

While Sen.-elect Scott Brown (R-Mass.) has been invited to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC director Lisa De Pasquale tells me that a Brown appearance is looking less likely.

“I was told that he’s not doing any out of state events for a few months after swearing in,” said Pasquale.

After Sarah Palin, Brown may be the most-beloved Republican Party figure not taking the CPAC stage. Marco Rubio is keynoting the conference; Glenn Beck is giving the closing speech.

Zachary Roth has details on the recent history of the Pelican Institute, the libertarian Louisiana think tank that brought James O’Keefe into the state before the alleged bungled Landrieu phone plot. That the institute “went after ACORN” is totally unsurprising — what conservative or libertarian group hasn’t? — but O’Keefe and his three alleged co-conspirators have plenty to reveal about how this plot was hatched.

Before James O’Keefe recorded his undercover ACORN videos he cut this Yes Men-ish video for Right.org, in which his “Taxpayers Clearing House,” mimicking the Publisher’s Clearing House, conducted a series of stunts to attack the bailouts. They drove up to the homes of ordinary people, seemingly awarding them enormous checks, then informing them that the checks were for corporations — the taxpayers got $20,000 “invoices.” They tried to deliver the checks to corporations, unsurprisingly getting rebuffed.

The most interesting thing I saw in the video occurred at the 4:00 mark, after one of the pranksters has been “detained by the police.” It looked as though O’Keefe was taping the phone call from the officer with a device in his right hand.

What’s happening on James O’Keefe’s Facebook wall? Almost exactly what you’d expect.

A friend passes on a copy of the inaugural issue of The Centurion, the conservative paper James O’Keefe started at Rutgers University — before he worked for a year at the Leadership Institute, helping conservatives on other campuses start their own publications.

The issue is after the jump, and it’s worth checking out now that we know that O’Keefe’s alleged co-conspirators also came from the world of conservative campus activism. And O’Keefe’s first editor’s note contains the statement — “the truth will set you free” — that he gave to reporters when leaving the courthouse yesterday.

Disguising truth has helped every blood-thirsty tyrant and dictator keep the shackles on humanity throughout history.  Let us rock the foundations of academia and challenge the thrones that have for too long indoctrinated us about our world and the context in which we live. As the Journal of Conservative thought at Rutgers university THE CENTURION will try its hardes to serve to that end.  Turn the page. You may read things you agree with and you may read things that you disagree with. But at least you’ll come closer to realizing your own truth, and in the words of Jesus Christ, “The truth shall set you free.”

Justin Elliot catches Andrew Breitbart giving a factual-but-tortured explanation of how Big Government was not responsible for James O’Keefe’s bungled phone plot against Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). The interviewer is Hugh Hewitt — for what it’s worth, a veteran of the Nixon administration who once ran the 37th president’s official library.

AB: So when [O’Keefe] puts a story out there, it’s on the Brietbart sites, the Big sites, that he can tell people what transpired. So…

HH: Do you pay him for that?

AB: Yes.

HH: And are you free to tell me how much you pay him?

AB: I’ll… perhaps at another date, but he’s paid a fair salary.

HH: Is he… so he is an employee?

AB: I’m not sure that’s technically the thing, but yes, he’s paid for his life rights. And he’s, you know, he’s still… we reserve the right to say yes or no to any of the stories that he puts up on our site as we do to any other contributor who comes to the site.

HH: Will it be a mischaracterization to say he was working for you when he went about this?

AB: Well, I mean, no. He was not involved in anything that was related to Big Government, or Breitbart.com.

HH: And I think that’s the key thing. Lots of people work for lots of corporations, and do dumb and sometimes illegal things that are not within the scope of their employment. And this was not within the scope of his employment.

AB: Yes, absolutely. That is absolutely the case.

From the outset, Breitbart and Big Government editor-in-chief Mike Flynn have said that O’Keefe was acting on his own, and that they had no knowledge whatsoever of what he was planning in New Orleans. No one has proven them wrong. But Big Government, like many conservative news sites, has run repeated stories linking unions to ACORN based on minor financial ties — or less.

A Jan. 6 story at Big Government accused ACORN and “big labor” of being in cahoots because “ACORN files labor organization financial reports for SEIU 880 and SEIU 100 with the U.S. Department of Labor.” A Jan. 5 story made the case against National Labor Relations Board nominee Craig Becker because he was endorsed by ACORN founder Wade Rathke. A December 2009 story about Health Care for America Now accused the organization of being a front group for ACORN because ACORN members were listed as state contacts. “In short,” argued reporter Larry O’Connor, “HCAN is ACORN.” It’s hard to imagine that if this story was flipped — if someone on the ACORN payroll was busted spying on a senator — Big Government would give ACORN a free pass.

I give Breitbart and Flynn the benefit of the doubt on this story. But if the standards and scrutiny that Big Government applies to left-wing groups are flipped back on the Website, it’s going to be tough to argue that it’s not at all connected to O’Keefe’s potential crime. Again, I’m not stating an equivalence between this situation and the ACORN scandals. I’m just saying that if O’Keefe was paid by Big Government, this story isn’t going away.

By a surprisingly clear 53-47 and 54-46 margins, voters in Oregon have approved ballot measures raising taxes on wealthier residents. It’s the sort of story you’d hear more about if it went the other way. As Fox News reported yesterday:

The No campaign is also getting a boost from the Republican National Committee. An RNC staffer has been helping out the last several weeks hoping to show that the country’s mood is for less government spending and lower taxes. They’re hoping to build on the momentum from last week’s Senate election in Massachusetts where Republican Scott Brown won the seat held for decades by liberal icon Ted Kennedy.

Not hearing a lot on this from the Republican National Committee today.

On Monday morning, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, both age 24, dressed up as telephone company workers and walked into the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). Inside the office, waiting for them, was James O’Keefe, the 25-year-old conservative activist who posed as a pimp in 2009 for a series of undercover videos that badly damaged the national community organization ACORN. As Basel and Flanagan clumsily worked on the phones, O’Keefe was recording them for a reason that remains unknown. When the “repairmen” and accomplices were asked for ID, they gave themselves up and were arrested.

In an affidavit detailing the bungled sting operation, FBI Agent Steven Rayes argued that “there is probable cause to believe that Flanagan and Basel by false and fraudulent pretense attempted to enter, and did in fact enter, real property belonging to the United States” in order to bug phones, and that they were “aided and abetted” by O’Keefe and a 24-year-old activist named Stan Dai. One day later, the botched operation has become national news, an embarrassment that could tarnish the conservative media that turned O’Keefe’s ACORN stings into a national sensation. While O’Keefe, Basel, Flanagan, and Dai were released on $10,000 bonds, they face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty of “entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony.” The scandal marks a swift and staggering downfall for an activist who had been praised for months for doing the work the “mainstream media” wouldn’t do in exposing sloppy and illegal work by ACORN.

“If he’s done what it’s said he’s done,” said Seton Motley, director of communications at the conservative Media Research Center, “the left-wing media is going to be all over him in a way they weren’t when he did the ACORN investigation. They’re going to love pounding him on this.”

Motley didn’t excuse the charges against O’Keefe. “People can do good things and bad things,” said Motley. “James O’Keefe did a very good thing with the ACORN videos. If this is true, he did a very bad thing. I don’t think one cancels out the other.”

According to Robert Bluey, who investigated the “Rathergate” scandal for CNSNews in 2004 and who is now director of online strategy at the Heritage Foundation, with this stunt O’Keefe may have put himself in the company of fact-manufacturing journalists such as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.

“If you’re a journalist, you have to follow certain laws of ethics,” Bluey said. “If this is true, it clearly falls outside the bounds of journalistic ethics.”

Bluey was hopeful that O’Keefe’s scandal wouldn’t reflect poorly on other conservative journalists. “He made clear that he was not doing this from any ideological perspective.”

O’Keefe, a self-described “progressive radical” who studied the tactics of Saul Alinsky, made a name for himself at Rutgers University as the founder of a conservative newspaper and a producer of hidden camera stings of politically correct administrators. From 2006 through 2007 he worked for the Leadership Institute, training conservative students on how to start campus publications. In July and August 2009 he and 20-year-old activist Hannah Giles posed, respectively, as a pimp and prostitute seeking advice for cheating on their taxes from various ACORN employees across the country. Their investigation badly damaged ACORN and fueled a successful congressional effort to temporarily prevent the group from receiving any federal funds. O’Keefe and Giles quickly became conservative icons, sought-after speakers at Tea Party protests and events like The American Spectator’s annual dinner.

“Now James is a national conservative hero,” wrote Leadership Institute president Morton Blackwell in a October 15, 2009, blog post for CampusReform.org, “and I believe he will write his own ticket to a future career doing just what he loves to do.”

On Tuesday, conservatives scrambled to contain the damage from O’Keefe’s Louisiana debacle. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website hosted the ACORN tapes and pioneered a new breed of aggressive conservative investigative journalism. Mike Flynn, the editor-in-chief of Big Goverment, told TWI that the site was not working with O’Keefe; Flynn told libertarian Reason magazine that “unlike the left, I don’t believe the ends justify the means.”

In a statement to TWI and other media outlets, Breitbart said much the same thing.

“We have no knowledge about or connection to any alleged acts and events involving James O’Keefe at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office,” Breitbart said. “We only just learned about the alleged incident this afternoon. We have no information other than what has been reported publicly by the press.”

The potential blowback from the Landrieu sting extended to some Republican members of Congress. In October, Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) introduced a resolution honoring “the fact-finding reporting done by Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III.” The resolution credited the two activists with “exemplary actions as government watchdogs and young journalists uncovering wasteful government spending” and asked for the House to officially honor them and “transmit an enrolled copy” of the resolution to them. Thirty-one other Republicans co-sponsored the resolution. On Tuesday night, Olson gave TWI a statement criticizing O’Keefe’s actions while maintaining that the ACORN sting had performed a valuable service.

“Individuals who lawfully expose wrongful activities by an entity like ACORN receiving federal tax dollars should be praised,” said Olson. However, if recent events conclude that any laws were broken in the incident in Senator Landrieu’s office – that is not something I condone.  Citizens have an important role in helping to expose waste and/or fraud when their tax dollars are being spent, but it must be done in a lawful manner.”

ACORN deputy director Kevin Whelan pounced on the story as “further evidence of [O’Keefe’s] disregard for the law in pursuit of his extremist agenda.” According to Whelan, it was more evidence that O’Keefe’s original videos “had been shot illegally and edited deceptively in order to undermine the work of an organization that has empowered working families for four decades.”

While attention is beginning to spread to O’Keefe’s lesser-known accomplices, it’s the apparent downfall of a conservative journalistic star that is leading TV and newspaper reports on the botched sting. On the way out of a Louisiana courthouse, O’Keefe’s first statement to the media was “veritas”–Latin for “truth,” and half of the name of his video company, Veritas Visuals.

“The truth,” said O’Keefe, “shall set me free.”

In October, freshman Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) introduced a resolution honoring James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles for their ACORN sting. Thirty-one Republicans co-sponsored the resolution. Tonight, I asked Olson’s office whether the resolution would be withdrawn and got this response:

Individuals who lawfully expose wrongful activities by an entity like ACORN receiving federal tax dollars should be praised.  However, if recent events conclude that any laws were broken in the incident in Senator Landrieu’s office – that is not something I condone.  Citizens have an important role in helping to expose waste and/or fraud when their tax dollars are being spent, but it must be done in a lawful manner.

Still unclear — whether the resolution (which had next to no chance of passing) will be withdrawn.

I’ve just spoken to Andrew Breitbart, the proprietor of Big Government–the website which published and promoted James O’Keefe’s undercover sting of ACORN offices–about the arrest of James O’Keefe.

“We have no knowledge about or connection to any alleged acts and events involving James O’Keefe at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office,” said Breitbart. “We only just learned about the alleged incident this afternoon. We have no information other than what has been reported publicly by the press. Accordingly, we simply are not in a position to make any further comment.”

James O’Keefe, who posed as a pimp for undercover sting videos that badly damaged the credibility of ACORN, has been arrested for apparently trying to pull a sting on the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

FBI Special Agent Steven Rayes alleges that O’Keefe aided and abbetted two others, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, who dressed up as employees of a telephone company and attempted to interfere with the office’s telephone system.

A fourth person, Stan Dai, was accused of aiding and abetting Basel and Flanagan. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

O’Keefe had become a conservative media star since the ACORN sting. I just talked to Lisa De Pasquale, director of CPAC, who said that O’Keefe, along with co-stinger Hannah Giles and Andrew Breitbart, is (or was) under consideration for the annual conservative conference’s coveted Reagan Award.

Mike Flynn, the editor of Big Government–where the ACORN videos originally appeared–told me that the conservative news site had no knowledge of what O’Keefe was up to.

“We had absolutely no clue what he was up to,” said Flynn, “and now you see why! It’s a complete surprise to us. We’ll just see what happens.”

UPDATE: The FBI’s press release on the case:

Four Men Arrested for Entering Government Property Under False Pretenses for the Purpose of Committing a Felony

NEW ORLEANS—JOSEPH BASEL, age 24; ROBERT FLANAGAN, age 24; JAMES O’KEEFE, age 25; and STAN DAI, age 24, were charged in a criminal complaint with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony, announced the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

According to the complaint, which was unsealed earlier today, the arrest of FLANAGAN, BASEL, O’KEEFE, and DAI took place after BASEL and O’KEEFE attempted to gain access to the New Orleans office of United States Senator Mary Landrieu on January 25, 2010, while posing as telephone repairmen. According to the complaint, FLANAGAN and BASEL were each dressed in blue denim pants, blue work shirts, light green fluorescent vests, tool belts, and construction-style hard hats when they entered the Hale Boggs Federal Building, located at 500 Poydras Street, New Orleans, Louisiana 70130. Once in the building, FLANAGAN and BASEL sought access to the offices of Senator Landrieu. O’KEEFE was already present in the office, holding a cellular phone so as to record FLANAGAN and BASEL. Once inside Senator Landrieu’s reception area, FLANAGAN and BASEL told a member of Senator Landrieu’s staff that they were telephone repairmen, and they requested access to the main telephone at the reception desk. FLANAGAN and BASEL then manipulated the telephone system. FLANAGAN and BASEL next requested access to the telephone closet because they needed to perform work on the main telephone system. They were directed to the main office of the United States General Services Administration, also inside the Hale Boggs Federal Building, where they again represented themselves to be employees of the telephone company and stated that they needed to perform repair work in the telephone closet. Both FLANAGAN and BASEL stated that they had left their credentials in their vehicle. In addition, the complaint alleges that O’KEEFE and DAI assisted FLANAGAN and  BASEL in the planning, coordination, and preparation of the operation. The men were apprehended by the United States Marshal’s Service soon thereafter.

If convicted, FLANAGAN, BASEL, O’KEEFE, and DAI each face a maximum term of 10 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, and three (3) years of supervised release following any term of imprisonment.

The United States Attorney’s Office reiterated that the complaint is merely a charge and that the guilt of the defendant must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

The investigation is being conducted by Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Deputy Marshals with the United States Marshal’s Service. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Jordan Ginsberg.

Greg Sargent hears something similar to what I’m hearing about Republican plans for a possible Democratic push to pass elements of health care reform through reconciliation.

[A senior GOP aide] said the leadership — Senators Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, Lamar Alexander, etc. — are discussing how to exploit the fact that the reconciliation process allows for an “open-ended amendment process.”

That means there’s no limit on the number of amendments GOPers can offer, the aide said, or on their subject matter. A senior Democratic aide confirmed that this is the case — and that it’s a concern weighing on Dems.

“If you bring a reconciliation bill to the Senate, it’s a free for all of amendments,” the GOP aide said, cautioning that this was only part of the overall strategy. “There is no way to limit the number of amendments that are voted on. You can’t close debate. Democrats will have to vote on every politically perilous amendment that you can possibly think of.”

There’s a consensus that reconciliation is too politically thorny for Democrats to use right now. Earlier today, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) shook his head when I asked him if Democrats could use the process — it was “tradition,” he said, only to use it for budget issues, which was why reconciliation was fine for deep tax code changes but not fine for health care reforms.

At a luncheon held at the Heritage Foundation, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) was cautiously open to the idea of a three-year non-defense discretionary spending freeze floated last night by the White House.

“I never met a spending freeze I didn’t like,” said Pence. The first he’d heard of the concept, he said, came at a December 2009 meeting at the White House when Republicans suggested it. Rather than dismissing the idea as a political stunt, Pence was ready to take some ownership of it. “I’d welcome a sincere attempt at a spending freeze.”

Pence also joked a bit about how the media covered conservatives. “The New York Times reported that there were a few thousand on the mall on 9/12,” said Pence. “Fox News reported that there were a billion.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee  is up on the air in South Carolina with an ad not-so-secretly aimed at getting Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.) to reconsider his career options. But the striking thing about the ad is its claim that “Spratt’s the architect of legislation Democrats may use to ram through a government takeover of health care.”

What does that mean? The NRCC spells it out in the press release that was sent to reporters. They’re knocking Spratt “for his authorship of a budget plan that would allow Pelosi and Congressional Democrats to ram government-run healthcare through Congress using an arcane procedure known as reconciliation.” They explain:

The budget that Spratt designed allows Democrats to strong-arm the government takeover of healthcare through the Senate with only 51 votes necessary to advance the bill, instead of the 60 votes required in the upper chamber.

So whether or not Democrats use the tools available to them and pass the health care bill, they’re going to get hammered on it. This has been obvious for weeks.

In 2005, University of Colorado Regent Tom Lucero gained a smidgen of national attention for his role in investigating — and eventually stripping of tenure — Ward Churchill, a left-wing professor who called workers in the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns.” Lucero’s been running for Congress in the 4th District — Republican turf captured by Rep. Betsey Markey (D-Colo.) in 2008 — but attracting little attention. This ad is meant to fix that:

It took two whole years for the university to oust Churchill — longer than a term in Congress.

Churchill provided a comment on the ad to a student newspaper, the Daily Camera.

I can think of no one who better reflects the principles and integrity of Colorado Republicans than Tom Lucero. Who knows? He might even have what it takes to be the next Dick Cheney.

Stephanie Mencimer answers a question that, as an occasional chronicler of the birther movement, I’ve had for some time. When they claim that the White House is spending millions of dollars to thwart their lawsuits, are they blowing smoke? Well, yes.

[C]onsider a case filed by one of the most prolific birther litigants, Philip J. Berg, that went all the way up to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. In November the court dismissed the appeal and ordered Berg to pay the legal costs for the defendants, which included the Federal Election Commission. Here was the government’s big chance to recoup its millions. But when the FEC submitted its bill, the grand total came to $20.40.

Basically, birther lawyers and exploiters like to cite the entire legal bills paid to law firms that defend against these lawsuits and say “that’s how much Obama has spent to thwart us.” They’ve willfully decided not to investigate further.

ThinkProgress spots Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) mulling a jump to the Republican Party in this interview. I’m struck by another part of the interview, in which Lieberman entertains the idea of opposing the phenomenally popular state attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who’s leading by better than 2-1 margins in the race for the Chris Dodd’s open Senate seat. The problem, says Lieberman, is that Blumenthal supported Ned Lamont in 2006, while possible GOP candidate Linda McMahon “was good enough to support me financially and politically.”

One quick thing that I didn’t mention in today’s piece about a training session and media meet-and-greet that FreedomWorks held for Tea Party activists was the presence of Richard Pollock, the Washington, D.C., editor of Pajamas Media. The conservative media company and its PJTV channel were early, unheralded promoters of the first wave of Tea Parties, a tradition that Pollock said he wanted to uphold.

“I want to say something you won’t hear the mainstream media say,” said Pollock. “I’m so honored to be in your presence. I’m privileged to be with you. And we want to know what you guys are doing. If you have something that you want PJTV to know about, let us know.”

The Conservative Political Action Conference is holding an online vote for two big prizes — the 2010 Blogger of the Year and the 2010 Journalist of the Year. Nominees after the jump: