All posts tagged James O’Keefe

Remarks And Asides

Dear God,

Please talk Donald Trump into running for president. I take back everything I’ve ever said about Your Party, about Michele Bachmann, about Sarah Palin, even about Anson Burlingame.  Just please let him run and let the GOP pick him as its nominee.  Pretty please?

Prayerfully,

Duane

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Everybody’s making a big deal out of Newt Gingrich’s egregious flip-flop on what to do in Libya. First he can’t wait to go in, then when Obama goes in, he says he shouldn’t have gone in.  If a man can’t make up his mind about which woman with whom he wants to live happily ever after, why should anyone think he can make up his mind about which dictator we should bomb?

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A new Pew poll shows that “nearly half (47%) of registered voters say they would like to see Barack Obama reelected, while 37% say they would prefer to see a Republican candidate win the 2012 election.”  The overview of the Pew survey, though, says,

In part, Obama is benefitting from the fact that the GOP has yet to coalesce behind a candidate.

All the more reason, God, to get Donald Trump to run.  Please?

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Speaking of Republican candidates for president, Herman Cain, famous for broiling Whoppers for Burger King (actually, he’s somewhat famous for running Godfather’s Pizza), attended a rally of home-schoolers yesterday in Des Moines. 

Along with other candidates present, he, of course, trashed the public school system, obligatory behavior for anyone wanting to be the GOP nominee.  But Cain, an African-American Tea Party favorite from the South, said something I found interesting. He reportedly denounced all government involvement in education and then said this:

That’s all we want is for government to get out of the way so we can educate ourselves and our children the old-fashioned way.

The “old-fashioned way“?  Hmm.  Was he talking about the real old-fashioned way, back when there were no schools, no books, and no teachers?  That far back?

Or was the 65-year-old Herman Cain, who admits to a working-class pedigree, talking about the old-fashioned days in the 1950s when he would have spent his formative years in Georgia public schools?  

The old-fashioned way in those days in the South was to segregate-then-educate kids like Herman Cain, and despite the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, some parts of Georgia did not even begin to integrate the schools until 1970.

According to Professor Michael Gagnon,

In defiance of Brown v. Board of Education, The Georgia School Board required public school teachers to sign a pledge that they would not teach in integrated schools in 1955 or they would lose their teaching license.

Is that the old-fashioned way the GOP candidate for president pines for?

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Finally, James O’Keefe, the scoundrel whose creative video edits have killed ACORN and wounded NPR, while simultaneously giving Sean Hannity a Viagra-like boner, is in debt.  In fact, he claims he’s in debt up to $50,000.  Fifty G’s.  He has sent out a fund-raising email to supporters, saying he had to finance much of his wonderful work on the credit card:

We made a lot of sacrifices—personally and financially —because we fight for what we believe in.

It’s not clear to me how he can both claim he has sacrificed financially and yet beg others to pay his bills, but in any case, I am setting up the James O’Keefe Relief Fund here at The Erstwhile Conservative.  Just send in your donations and I will be sure he gets the money. No amount is too small.

Trust me at least as much as you trust him.

by R. Duane Graham on March 24, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on March 24, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/remarks-and-asides-18/

Conservative “Journalism” And NPR

In yet another sad example of how conservative “journalism” is ruining real journalism, we now know that “several influential journalists” “regret” giving the fraudulent James O’Keefe’s video sting of NPR “wider circulation without scrutinizing them.”

That bit of melancholic news was reported today in a story broadcast on NPR, which finally got its act together and did some digging into the raw, unedited two-hour footage of the O’Keefe operation.  And to no one’s surprise this side of Bill O’Reilly, O’Keefe has been exposed—again— for the miscreant he is.

I saw O’Keefe on CNN’s Reliable Sources yesterday, where he claimed he was a real journalist and where he said, as NPR quotes him,

The tape is very honest. The tape cuts to the core of who these people are.

Never mind that O’Keefe, who ran afoul of the law in Louisiana trying to conduct another unprofessional sting on Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, attempted to judge an entire news organization by the words of a fundraiser. 

But one would think O’Keefe would at least present what that fundraiser said honestly, if what he said was so egregious.  But nope. He couldn’t even do that.

NPR reporter David Folkenflik quotes former broadcaster Al Tompkins who now teaches journalism at the Poynter Institute:

“What I saw was an executive at NPR expressing overtly political opinions that I was really uncomfortable with,” Tompkins said. “Particularly the way the video was edited, it just seemed he was spouting off about practically everything.”

But Tompkins said his mind was changed by watching that two-hour version.

“I tell my children there are two ways to lie,” Tompkins said. “One is to tell me something that didn’t happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen. I think they employed both techniques in this.”

Many of the same dishonest techniques used to distort what ACORN employees said and did—which led to the death of that organization and made O’Keefe famous on Fox—were used to distort the picture of what NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller said to whom he thought were potential Islamic donors.

O’Keefe’s point was to taint NPR by portraying Schiller (and his associate who was present) as typical representatives of the news organization who were sympathetic to sharia-loving Muslim donors who also saw “Zionist influence” in our news coverage. Except Schiller—six times—made the following point on the unedited tape:

There is such a big firewall between funding and reporting: Reporters will not be swayed in any way, shape or form.

NPR asked a digital forensics consultant to review the tapes, who personally said he found some of Schiller’s responses disturbing. But the story continues:

But by analyzing time stamps, Menz concluded that many of Schiller’s remarks in that shorter video are presented out of sequence from the questions that were posed.

“For me, in my background, it immediately puts things into question,” Menz said. “You really don’t know what context these were in, what was going on in the 20 minutes before and after this question was asked.”

Take the political remarks. Ron Schiller speaks of growing up as a Republican and admiring the party’s fiscal conservatism. He says Republican politicians and evangelicals are becoming “fanatically” involved in people’s lives.

But in the shorter tape, Schiller is also presented as saying the GOP has been “hijacked” by Tea Partiers and xenophobes.

In the longer tape, it’s evident Schiller is not giving his own views but instead quoting two influential Republicans — one an ambassador, another a senior Republican donor. Schiller notably does not take issue with their conclusions — but they are not his own.

Today’s NPR story characterized Al Tompkins’ assessment of O’Keefe’s video as “repeatedly and blatantly unfair.”  He also said,

I think that Ron Schiller actually did a fairly remarkably good job of explaining how NPR works and what you can and cannot expect if you contribute money to the NPR Foundation.

And none other than the editor of Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, Scott Baker, told NPR that he had what must have been a rather grudging respect for the professionalism of the two NPR fundraising executives:

I think if you look at two hours in total, you largely get an impression that these are pretty — they seem to be fairly balanced people, trying to do a fairly good job.

Well, it’s much too late for that accounting, given that mainstream media ran with the phony story and NPR’s board overreacted and handed heads to O’Keefe and his Fox supporters.

But maybe, just maybe, next time real journalists won’t be so quick to act on the word of a conservative activist pretending to be a muckraker.

by R. Duane Graham on March 14, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on March 14, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/conservative-journalism-and-npr/

Did Billy Long Help Murder George Tiller?

Little did I know that yesterday, as I was criticizing Ozark Billy Long for his co-sponsorship of an abortion bill that would essentially redefine rape, that The Auctioneer was tweeting this:

Let me make his tweet clear:

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Shock Investigation: Planned Parenthood Advises ‘Pimp’ on Underage Sex Trafficking, Secret Abortions for Minors

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You will notice that Ozark Billy references a site called Big Journalism.  Guess what?  That site is officially called:

Andrew Breitbart.  Let me see. Why is that name familiar?

Oh, yeah:  Breitbart tried to destroy a woman named Shirley Sherrod by painting her as a racist via carefully edited video, which when viewed in its entirety, revealed her to be a thoughtful critic of racism.

Oh, yeah:  Breitbart helped destroy ACORN through promotion of James O’Keefe and his highly edited videos of ACORN employees that were later found to be false representations of those employees.  Subsequent investigations of ACORN vindicated the organization, but overreaction in Congress directly related to Breitbart’s and O’Keefe’s accusations effectively killed the group.  O’Keefe is now serving three years probation for “entering a federal building under false pretenses,” as he attempted to set up LouisianaSenator Mary Landrieu in another one of his video “gotchas.”

Now we find that Breitbart is promoting the work of a group called “Live Action,” whose president is Lila Rose, whom you may have seen on Fox’s O’Reilly or Hannity or Glenn Beck.  Rose is a 21-year-old anti-abortion activist who has ties to James O’Keefe, and both admit to learning some of their tactics from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”  How sweetly ironic. 

Live Action produced an O’Keefe-like pimp video, this time in order to entrap Planned Parenthood, the most hated target of the anti-choice movement.  The video is called “Undercover at Planned Parenthood” and was released yesterday. You can watch the highly edited version here or watch the allegedly complete unedited version here. 

Does anyone in southwest Missouri believe that Ozark Billy actually watched these videos before he tweeted about this “Shock Investigation“?  Most of us know that anyone who would get his news from Andrew Breitbart wouldn’t bother to actually do any research before he forwarded such propaganda.

Essentially, in the video a “pimp” and his “prostitute” enter the Central Jersey Planned Parenthood clinic and pretend to be in the sex business, “managing” underage girls, mostly illegal immigrants. They are seeking help for the girls in the form of testing, birth control, and possibly abortions.  The manager of the clinic, Amy Woodruff, assisted them in ways that are obviously inappropriate.  So, the sting engineered by Live Action successfully indicts Ms. Woodruff and she has been fired by Planned Parenthood.  Its executive director said:

“We have a zero tolerance policy for this kind of behavior, and the employee in the video was immediately suspended from her duties [Tuesday] morning and was terminated [Tuesday] evening,” Kinsler said. “We are fully committed to delivering high-quality reproductive health care to the women of our communities, complying with all laws, and upholding the highest ethical standards.”

But the real question is this: Does the video indict Planned Parenthood itself?  Of course not.  Remember that Billy Long’s tweet said that “Planned Parenthood Advises ‘Pimp’ on Underage Sex Trafficking, Secret Abortions for Minors.”  The truth is, though, that Planned Parenthood had already alerted Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department of “potential sex trafficking” well before the Live Action video was released on February 1.  An AP story titled “Planned Parenthood seeks FBI probe” appeared on January 24.  That story noted that the FBI investigation was already under way. 

So, we have Planned Parenthood notifying federal authorities about suspicious visits to its clinics by men purporting to be sex traffickers prior to the release of the sting video. And we have Planned Parenthood firing an employee who acted improperly during one of those visits. 

Additionally, if one watches the sting video, one sees that Ms. Woodruff is very careful to note that what she is doing would get her in trouble, suggesting strongly that she knew her superiors would not approve of her actions. In that sense, the video exonerates Planned Parenthood as an organization, which isn’t exactly what its creators intended.

And if we applied the logic of this unseemly attack on Planned Parenthood to the so-called pro-life movement, we could say that the entire pro-life movement murdered Dr. George Tiller in Wichita.  Does anyone want to play that game?  Does our anti-choice congressman want me to tweet:

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Shock Investigation: “pro-life” Billy Long “advised” Scott Roeder to kill Dr. Tiller

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Huh?  Of course not.  That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?

I want to end with a comment posted on Live Action’s website.  The passionate comment demonstrates why Planned Parenthood is so valuable:

commonsense permalink

This video is highly disturbing, however, I don’t believe for one minute that this is planned parenthood policy, that is condoned behavior, or that this type of behavior is rampant within planned parenthood. Hint #1 to this, would be the fact she specifically says “you didn’t hear this from me” (so must know she would be in trouble if she were heard saying any of this), the fact that she calls the nurse who actually treats the girls a c*nt, (I feel pretty safe presuming that nurse would not condone this behavior) and that there is no one else around.

This is disgusting, this is alarming, and this women should be dealt with swiftly and harshly, but there are bad seeds everywhere in life, as well as good ones. Planned parenthood as a whole should not be condemned for this.

I was young and poor many years ago, and the only female health care I could afford was planned parenthood. I found them to be very concerned, legitimate, and attentive to my health needs. I am quite certain if anyone in the office I went to thought I was being pimped, they’d have addressed it properly. This women didn’t call anyone right away and report it, because she is garbage…but someone else did!

by R. Duane Graham on February 2, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on February 2, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/did-billy-long-help-murder-george-tiller/