All posts tagged "Acorn"

Federal appeals court in NY tosses decision barring Congress from withholding funds for ACORN

O'Reilly: Fox kicks MSNBC's butt in the ratings; Maddow: You're still wrong on what really matters

A former ACORN employee in San Diego who lost his job after being filmed giving advice to "ACORN pimp" James O'Keefe is suing the amateur videographer and his partner, Hannah Giles, San Diego CityBeat's Dave Maass reported Friday.

When a duo of right-wing provocateurs posing as a pimp and prostitute released selectively-edited videos trying to impugn the community activist group ACORN, both Democrats and Republicans condemned the organization.

[rebelmouse-image 24749201 original_size="238x332" expand=1]Salon has put together a list of the 11 most bogus media stories of 2009. A few of them, such as the balloon boy hoax or Lady Gaga's non-existent penis, are just those silly stories that capture the public imagination from time to time. I don't actually mind those stories---except in the case where the coverage gets so intense it starts to seem like a human rights abuse of its targets, such as the Tiger Woods story (which didn't make the top 11!)---because you often learn something about your fellow Americans by which stories fascinate them. Then there are a couple of others, such as the phony Abu Gharib story and the overblown role Twitter was given in the Iranian protests, that I can chalk up to a weird confluence of events. But the majority of the stories fit one theme. See if you can guess what it is:

The conservative attacks on the excesses of political correctness are not wholly without merit. For instance, it's certainly ridiculous to strive for a world where there are no labels, or where the invocation of any bit of identifying information with any potential social or cultural value attached to it is verboten. I think these things are utterly ridiculous, and, at all costs, we should support the conservative movement where they seek to stamp out this foolishness.