When will Breitbart apologize for the phony O'Keefe/pimp-dressing ACORN story? I've been writing a lot about this story as has Neiwert and many others because it reminded us what "ratf*&king is all about. O'Keefe is Breitbart's Nixonian hit man.
And Brietbart pays the man a salary don't forget.

Eric Boehlert writes a great piece on Breitbart and the phony pimp story:

Last September, when the ACORN scandal that his website helped launch was breaking in the press, Andrew Breitbart wrote a column for The Washington Times detailing the rollout of the undercover, right-wing gotcha. He recalled a 2009 meeting with "filmmaker and provocateur James O'Keefe" that took place in Breitbart's office in June. It was there that O'Keefe played the columnist the surreptitiously recorded videos he'd made with his sidekick, Hannah Giles, and which captured the two famously getting advice from ACORN workers on how prostitutes could skirt tax laws.

In his Times column, Breitbart was quite clear about what he saw that day in his office: He watched videos of O'Keefe "dressed as a pimp" sitting inside ACORN offices "asking for -- and getting -- help" from the misguided employees.

But today we know that's almost certainly not true. Breitbart didn't huddle in his office and watch clips of O'Keefe "dressed as a pimp" chatting with ACORN employees, because based on all the available evidence, O'Keefe wasn't dressed as a pimp while taping inside the ACORN offices.

Make no mistake: Last fall, both Breitbart and O'Keefe, with the help of Fox News, did their best to confuse people about that fact. It's true the duo seemed to purposefully push that falsehood and mislead the public and the press about the ACORN story. And more importantly, they did it to make the ACORN workers captured on video look like complete jackasses for not being able to spot O'Keefe's pimp ruse a mile away.

But the story was not true...read on

Breitbart is a wanker for pushing the obvious lies, but the media and Congress were also duped and made to look like fools.

Digby has more:

This story is important. There's a long tradition of undercover muckraking that's initiated many an important social change in this country. But this isn't muckraking, it's political theatre. The level of cynical deception in this "story" runs several layers deeper than anything I've ever seen before, tapping into some really nasty, subterranean veins of stereotype, prejudice and racism --- on everyone's part --- to make what ends up being a completely distorted point.

The fact that what should have been instantly seen as an obviously absurd proposition was taken at face value even by the US congress and the major media institutions of this country should inform us a little bit about how tenuous our racial progress might just be. This was a shameful episode deserving of more scrutiny than it's gotten so far...read on

Congress should immediately reinstate funds to ACORN. This knee-jerk action by Congress was a travesty.

The opinion columnists aren't very happy with the president or Congress lately. Bob Herbert, who is perhaps the only major columnist we have covering the economic reality of the working class, the poor and the recently-impoverished middle class, sounds as despairing as most liberal bloggers:

Job losses, stagnant or reduced wages over the past decade, and the loss of home equity when the housing bubble burst have combined to take a horrendous toll on families who thought they had done all the right things and were living the dream. A great deal of that bleeding is in the suburbs. The study, compiled by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, said, “Suburbs gained more than 2.5 million poor individuals, accounting for almost half of the total increase in the nation’s poor population since 2000.”

Democrats in search of clues as to why voters are unhappy may want to take a look at the report. In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people — more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population — fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.

The question for Democrats is whether there is anything that will wake them up to their obligation to extend a powerful hand to ordinary Americans and help them take the government, including the Supreme Court, back from the big banks, the giant corporations and the myriad other predatory interests that put the value of a dollar high above the value of human beings.

Frank Rich doesn't sound any happier, does he?

The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.

Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.

Yep. That's why health care reform is polling so low in some surveys - it's not that people don't want it, it's that they know the current incarnation is a confusing mess that will only add to their too-heavy financial burdens.

Tom Friedman warns Obama that Americans don't like angry politicians, we like "inspirational, hopeful" ones. As usual, he's largely oblivious -- although he has figured out people are angry. He just hasn't seemed to notice we've sort of soured on the "hopeful" meme just lately.

Longtime Villager George Will also warns Obama not to get too rowdy:

If Obama can now resist the temptation of faux populism, if he does not rage, like Lear on the heath, against banks, he can be what Americans, eager for adult supervision, elected him to be: a prudent grown-up. For this elegant and intelligent man to suddenly discover his inner William Jennings Bryan ("You shall not crucify America upon a cross of credit-default swaps") would be akin to Fred Astaire donning coveralls and clodhoppers.

Now, George. I'm sure you didn't mean to tie the African-American president of the United States to a tapdancer, did you? (Do you also call him "Bojangles"?)

The Broder thinks John Cornyn is "low key." (Maybe he should switch to club soda.)

And Ruth Marcus is stunned over the SCOTUS decision this week (go read the rest, it's good):

In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.

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Columnist David Brooks is a conservative that isn't blindly devoted to former Gov. Sarah Palin. "She's a joke. I can't take her seriously," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos Sunday. "The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are not going to elect a talk show host," said Brooks.

But the other conservative on the panel with Brooks wasn't buying into the Palin frenzy either. George Will thinks Republicans can do better. "Some conservatives think they have found in Sarah Palin a Republican William Jennings Bryan. Now, Why would they want someone who lost the presidency three times?" asked Will.

John Amato: David Brooks has never been much of a fan of Palin. This is from a piece in Oct, 2008:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.
--
But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

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Liz Cheney told Fox News' Chris Wallace that President Barack Obama should not travel to Oslo in December to accept the Nobel Prize. Cheney called the prize a "farce" that could only be legitimized if family of U.S. military accepted it.

"I think the president himself understands he didn't earn this prize and therefore the notion that this white house has said he would go to Oslo to accept the prize would add to the farce," said Cheney.

She offered the following proposal: "I think what he ought to do, frankly, is send the mother of a fallen American soldier to accept the prize on behalf of the U.S. military. Frankly, to send the message to remind the Nobel committee that each one of them sleeps soundly at night because the U.S. armed forces, because the U.S. military is the greatest peacekeeping force in the world today."

It should come as no surprise that neoconservative columnist Bill Kristol disagrees with the Nobel committee. He responded to the award with sarcasm. "It's hard for me to be objective about this because I'm so disappointed personally. I was up early Friday morning. I thought the phone might ring, you know. Pundits for peace. I deserve it pretty much. President Obama and I have done about the same amount to bring about world peace, I think," said Kristol.

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Syndicate columnist Charles Krauthammer appeared on Fox News Sunday with sharp criticism of President Barack Obama speech to the UN General Assembly. "I think he indulged himself in his speech at the General Assembly, which started out as sort of adolescent utopianism and went downhill. He started out saying things like no nation can dominate another. He said no group of nations ought to be above others," said Krauthammer.

"What do our allies think when they hear that and when they hear -- as we saw in the clip -- Obama denigrating his own country and presenting himself as the man who will redeem America from its wickedness and he said those of you who doubt that the character of America should look at what we -- meaning I -- have done in the last eight months, including joining the human rights council act at the U.N. which is a body which we should take no pride in being on. I thought it was a sorry performance. It did not advance our interest in the least," concluded Krauthammer.

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Conservative columnist David Brooks thinks Rush Limbaugh has gone too far in comparing President Barack Obama to Hitler. Brooks was stunned by the comparison when he first saw it on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday. "I hadn't seen the Rush Limbaugh thing. That is insane. What he's saying is insane," said Brooks.

Brooks went on to criticize Sarah Palin for saying that health care reform would create a "death panel" to euthanize older Americans. "Again, that's crazy. The crazies are attacking the plan because it'll cut off granny, and that's simply not true. That simply is not going to happen," explained Brooks.

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(Lobbies - like Baseball and Character Assassination, an American institution)

Lobbies have been part of our political landscape forever it seems. The cartoon above is from 1892, to give you an idea.

In 1949 it became the topic of much discussion and hand wringing. But as history proved in a Shakespearean way, it was Sound and Fury, signifying nothing.

The radio series American Forum of The Air ran a panel discussion on the problem. And on November 27, 1949 invited Herbert Q. Nelson from the National Real Estate Board, Joseph D.Keenan from the AF of L (pre-CIO) and Col. Robert S. Allen, a beltway columnist to discuss the situation and what could, if anything, be done about it.

Clearly, if they had any great ideas, nobody listened - or if they did they've been long forgotten.