In Kim Houghton’s case, you get a major First Amendment lawsuit.

Kim Houghton decided after a successful, 20-year career in advertising that she wanted more.  She wanted to realize her American Dream and become an entrepreneur in a business focused on dogs.

She had the gumption to quit her job and make her dream come true:  Wag More Dogs is a high-end canine daycare located next to a popular dog park in Arlington, Virginia.  Kim commissioned an outdoor mural on her wall that has cartoon dogs, bones and paw prints as a way to give something back to the park she’d frequented for years, and build up some good will for her new business.

The mural was a big hit.  After all, who doesn’t like puppies?   Things were smooth for a few months.

And then Arlington bureaucrats got involved.

Officials blocked Kim’s building permit and told her that she could not open unless she painted over the mural or covered it with a blue tarp.

Her crime?

Painting a piece of art that—in the eyes of government officials—had too strong a “relationship” to her business.

According to city bureaucrats, a mural that depicted something other than dogs would be fine.  Turn those adorable puppies into fire-breathing dragons or flying pink unicorns and she’d be back in business.

But because Kim’s sign shows puppies, it’s illegal.

Under the threat of losing her American Dream, Kim was forced to purchase an expensive tarp and cover the mural.   Several months later, it remains covered.

Today [FRIDAY], the Institute for Justice is showing up in federal court to change that.  Economic liberty expert Rob Frommer, the IJ attorney who filed the federal lawsuit on Kim’s behalf, is asking a judge to allow Kim to remove the tarp and once again display her mural.  Specifically, Rob wants a preliminary injunction so the law cannot be enforced until the lawsuit is settled.

As Rob explains in the Daily Caller:

Today I will ask the judge for a preliminary injunction, meaning we want the court to temporarily stop the city from enforcing this terrible law until our lawsuit strikes it down for good.  When we prevail, we will have done more than just help Kim tear down a tarp.  We will have advanced the cause of liberty by vindicating in federal court a simple but incredibly important legal principle:  Under the First Amendment the right to speak is just that, a right—not a privilege for government officials to dole out as they please.

The editorial board of the Washington Post agrees with Rob.  In a powerful editorial written in conjunction with the launch of the lawsuit, the paper wrote:

[The lawsuit] notes that there would not have been a problem if the mural depicted flowers, dragons or ponies instead of dogs. The absurdity that reveals should cause Arlington residents to wonder about their government’s grasp of common sense.

What do you think?

Are Arlington officials using common sense?  Or are they violating Kim’s rights by playing art critic with her sign?  Please let us know your thoughts on our facebook page.

In Washington, DC, talking about the Bill of Rights can land you in jail for 90 days.

Our nation’s capital has a licensing scheme in place that makes it illegal for anyone to “guide or escort” anyone else for hire without first getting the government’s permission. To get the license, which the Washington Post editorial board labeled a Tour de farce, eager entrepreneurs must first pay hundreds of dollars in fees, fill out a bunch of forms and pass an arbitrary test.

That is, they need to jump through all sorts of needless hoops before they’re allowed to speak.

[Please help promote this video by voting it up and commenting on reddit here.]

The bottom line is that the Constitution protects your right to communicate for a living, whether you are a journalist, a stand-up comedian, a musician, or a tour guide.  The government cannot be in the business of deciding who may speak and who may not.

That is why two Washington, DC, tour guides—Tonia Edwards and Bill Main, who run a company called Segs in the City—joined forces with the Institute for Justice to file a major federal lawsuit challenging DC’s tour-guide licensing scheme as a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights. Video and photos of the press conference are online.

Nearly every day, Tonia and Bill teach a group of people how to ride Segways and then take them around Washington, DC, on a tour of the city.  Their business is located near the National Archives, so one of the things they tell their customers is where the Bill of Rights is located.  For this, the city government could throw them in prison for three months.

The issue at stake transcends political ideology.  Matt Yglesias, the influential blogger for the Center for American Progress, recently wrote about DC’s draconian law on his excellent blog:

[T]his sure seems like bad policy to me. It’s a barrier to entry that’s nice for existing tour guides and for companies in the “help tour guides pass our exam” industry, but that’s ultimately bad for visitors to the city and bad for DC residents who might want to make some money giving tours. You don’t need a license to be a tour guide in Boston and as best I can tell everything’s fine . . . . Customers there are protected by the general laws against fraud and other forms of criminal misconduct as well as whatever discipline the marketplace and people’s concern for their reputation provides.

IJ attorney Robert McNamara points out in the Washington Post that DC’s licensing scheme is part of larger, nationwide problem:

In the past 50 years, there has been an explosion of laws that require people to get a license before they join the workforce. In the 1950s, only about one out of every 20 Americans needed a license to pursue the occupation of their choice. Today, that number is one out of every three.

Simply put, occupational licensing in the United States is out of control.  The fact that you cannot even talk without a license in the nation’s capital is just another example of government gone wrong.

Click here for more on the lawsuit. The Institute for Justice is also online at facebook, You Tube and twitter.

“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”

This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium by and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.

Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.

Was I really that conservative? Yes.

I interned at the libertarian Center for Individual Rights in the summer of 2001. I supported the Iraq War and crashed an anti-war protest on my campus. I voted in Republican primaries in 2002 and 2004. (Since I was in Illinois, I voted in 2004 for Jack Ryan to get the GOP’s nomination for Senate, to oppose Barack Obama. I’m better off than one of those guys.)

But I was never combative against liberals. Reporting in a close-knit campus community made it impossible and untenable to pick political fights every day. I was more interested in covering politics than in advocating for a political stance (outside of columns I wrote for my paper and later the daily campus paper). I cared more about finding out stories first than about advocating positions — those stories would get me the jobs I wanted, not the opinions I had. And I knew that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed.

In 2004, when I was graduating, I was offered two jobs — an editing role at the libertarian magazine Liberty and a fellowship at USA Today, sponsored by the conservative Collegiate Network. I chose the USA Today job, but kept freelancing, mostly for magazines like The American Spectator and Reason.

A few months after my USA Today gig ended, I was offered a full-time job at Reason. For the first time I had a byline at a national media outlet, and part of my job was to feed a blog with reporting and takes on the news. It became clear that two things were rewarded with traffic and respect — original reporting, and arguments with other blogs.

This was the start of my success, and it was the start of my problems. Remember how I said it was “impossible and untenable to pick political fights every day?” When I started doing real reporting, I realized that political fights happened every nanosecond. It was just a matter of managing them, and picking them. As I got to find out about gossip and news, I’d banter about it privately and publicly. That’s what everyone did. Let’s let David Brooks explain this:

So every few weeks I find myself on the receiving end of little burst of off-the-record trash talk. Senators privately moan about other senators. Administration officials gripe about other administration officials. People in the White House complain about the idiots in Congress, and the idiots in Congress complain about the idiots in the White House — especially if they’re in the same party. Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

To use a phrase that I’m rolling my eyes at even as I type it: Nobody told me this in journalism school. Seriously, though, nobody did! The fact that one part of journalism in Washington was a give-and-take of gossip, and that sources learned to trust one another by bitching about people and projects they didn’t like, was a total mindfuck. Put me in a room with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and I ask about where his “controlled demolitions” theory comes from. Put me in a room with a union organizer and I push him about how depressed he is about card check. Put me in a room with a GOP strategist and I tell him, in confidence, what the people I know on the left are saying about his candidate’s chances. How do I get people to tell me what they don’t want people to know?

Being at Reason allowed me to do this while broadcasting a clear opinion. Rep. Ron Paul (R, Tex.) knew that I liked him, and that I was voting for him — although that didn’t stop me from co-writing a story about the history of racist comments in newsletters he published. Bob Barr knew that I liked him, and trusted me enough to tell me, off-the-record, what he thought of people. I kept that trust with people, and people kept it with me. In this business you have to keep that trust or no one will talk to you, and then you can only learn what people want you to know.

Here’s an example from a bit later in my career. In September 2009, Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Creigh Deeds, bumbled and fumbled his way through an impromptu press event, utterly unable to explain whether or not he would raise taxes, and at one point calling a reporter “young lady.” I was at the Values Voter summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, where I pulled Rep. Eric Cantor (R, Va.) aside for an interview.

“Fair warning,” I said, framing him with my iPhone’s video camera. “I’m going to tape this. So let’s not have a Creigh Deeds moment.”

Did that comment make it unfair for me to write about Deeds? (His communications director, who appeared in the video wincing as his candidate imploded, was a college friend.) But can we assume no reporters joked about Deeds after the implosion? “The opinionless man,” as Jeff Jarvis put it in a post on my current adventures, does not exist. (Here I’d make a reference to the perfect-but-boring human prototypes that survive the end of civilization in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, but that would just be showing off.)

You’ve read this far, so you must think I’m trying to explain away the emails leaked this week. I’m not. Here’s what happened.

After the 2008 election, I drove up from Atlanta to D.C. and was greeted by my editor, Matt Welch, with surprising news. It would be better, he said, if I worked somewhere else. I’d voted for the Obama-Biden ticket (having joked, semi-seriously, that I was honor-bound to vote for a ticket with a fellow Delawarean on it) and wasn’t fully on board with the magazine’s upcoming, wonky focus on picking apart the new administration. My friend, Spencer Ackerman, immediately bought me Ethiopian food and suggested I come to work at his magazine, The Washington Independent. I was dicey about the suggestion, partly because I was already doing some work for The Economist. At Reason, I’d become a little less favorable to Republicans, and I’d never been shy about the fact that I was pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders. But could I do the same work if I jumped to a left-leaning web magazine? I figured that I could, largely because I wouldn’t change at all.

A few weeks later, Ezra Klein invited me to join Journolist — which I’d known about for a year. I don’t know why he did, but I think it was an assist to a friend trying out a new job, and a way to build my list of sources. I was dazzled by the sudden, immediate access I had to more than a hundred journalists and academics, mostly on the left, some without an ideology I could discern. And I was encouraged that they were so blunt about what they were thinking about and working on. My first big contribution to the list, in response to a question about which conservatives “mattered,” was sent out on January 26, 2009.

Hugh Hewitt, as buffoonish as he can seem, is incredibly well-used by Republicans. Check out the guest list for a week of his show – plenty of governors and congressmen show up. If you count Newt Gingrich as a pundit (I do and I’d be stunned if his yearly rumblings about political comebacks were anything more than book promotion stunts) I’d rank him near the top of this list, if not at the top. Hill Republicans who weren’t actually there for his screwed-up tenure speak of him as a prophet. Gingrich had a LOT to do with the drilling obsession and messaging that hit the GOP conference last summer. Finally, I’d nominate the very young Rob Bluey of Heritage for a place near the bottom of this list. He’s done a lot work convincing Republicans that they need to copy Democrats on internet outreach/YouTube/Twitter, and of course now they’re all obsessed with that stuff as the path back to victory.

One thing I’m watching is whether insulting Sarah Palin or occasionally praising Barack Obama is enough to drum someone out of the conservative movement in a real way – being disinvited from dinners, for example, as David Brock was after his Hillary book. I haven’t seen that yet, although conservative blogs are trying to write David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, etc out of the movement. This is a reason why President Obama scored more of a direct hit telling the GOP conference to “stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.” They really do stop and listen to talk radio, or their talk radio-massaged constituent mail/phone calls, before they take big steps.

This would become typical of what I sent to the list. I was talking, largely, to liberals who didn’t really know conservatives. So I assumed they thought Hugh Hewitt was “buffoonish.” I said Gingrich had a “screwed-up tenture” because Republicans I admired, like Sen. Tom Coburn (R, Ok.) and Dick Armey, had serious problems with how Gingrich ran the House.

But I was cocky, and I got worse. I treated the list like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was “really” happening out there, and snarking at conservatives. Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean. Yes, I’d trash-talk liberals to Republicans sometimes. And I’d tell them which liberals “mattered,” who was a hack, who was coming after them. Did I suggest which strategies might and might not work for liberals, Democrats, and the president? Yes, although I do the same to conservatives — in February, for example, I told many of them that Scott Brown’s election hadn’t killed health care reform, and they needed to avoid dancing in the endzone, because I was aware of what liberals were saying about how to come back.

Still, this was hubris. It was the hubris of someone who rose — objectively speaking — a bit too fast, and someone who misunderstood a few things about his trade. It was also the hubris of someone who thought the best way to be annoyed about something was to do it publicly. This is the reason I’m surprised at commentary accusing me of misrepresenting myself. One other part of my career that wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago is my Twitter account, which has been popular — I’m assuming — because I’m sarcastic and don’t hide my biases. That Twitter account has echoed the way, described above, that I talk to liberals and conservatives in private. And it’s flashed like Drudge’s siren with every take I have on Republican politicians, on Democratic politicians, on fringe movements — everything. When I tweeted that Van Jones needed to resign, I was also e-mailing this to Journolist:

Jones had five years to distance himself from this bullshit. Five years. He didn’t do it. And I can’t believe that a man who spoke at basically every left/liberal event in 2007 and 2008 did not see what the Truthers were up to.

Yes, as [Charles] Johnson points out, they’re liars who try and suck everyone into their orbit. One year ago I was backstage at a Ron Paul event with Kevin Barrett, the lunatic University of Wisconsin professor, who deliriously informed me of all these famous people he’d gotten on board with the Truth movement. He was full of shit–they were people who’d been accosted by Truthers and said nice things to blow them off. Here’s an example of a Truther baiting Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand into indulging his nonsense.

But there was nothing preventing people like Paul, or like Jones, from brushing aside people like Barrett from releasing clear statements that they didn’t believe in these conspiracy theories.

I’m talking to a few media companies about what I’ll do next. Anyone who wanted to force me out of this business will have to settle for the consolation prize of me having to tediously inform sources of a new e-mail address. No serious journalist has defended the leak of my private e-mails; no one who works in politics or journalism would accept a situation where the things they said off the record could immediately become public.  But no serious journalist — as I want to be, as I am — should be so rude about the people he covers.

Speaking at DePaul University on April 20, RNC Chairman Michael Steele urged Republican leaders to work with the Tea Parties.  He has the right approach, to which I would add the fact, per my article on BigGovernment.com, that The Republican Party began as a Tea Party Movement.

Steele then went on to say:

“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans.  This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass.  The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship.  People don’t walk away from parties.  Their parties walk away from them.  For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.  Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

Chairman Steele makes an interesting point, but he is accepting as true the Democrat version of events.  The theme of Back to Basics for the Republican Party is that celebrating our party’s heritage is not just for minority outreach but for all Republicans to appreciate that the GOP has been a great force for good ever since being founded in 1854 to oppose the Democrats’ pro-slavery, anti-freedom agenda.  I drew on that record of achievement in writing the historical information on the RNC website, also posted as Heroes and Heroics.

Chairman Steele’s analysis of the so-called “southern strategy” is a bit too simplistic and could use some historical context.  Since the end of Reconstruction the GOP scarcely existed in most of the South until the 1950s.  In fact, in 1952 the Republican Party was so weak there that Dwight Eisenhower had to rely on “Veterans for Eisenhower” organizations to conduct much of his campaign in the region.

So firm was the Democrat grip on the white southern vote that prior to Richard Nixon’s 1960 campaign, no Republican presidential candidate had ever done much campaigning in the South.  That year he broke new ground by deciding to campaign in every state.  Prior to legislative advances of the civil rights movement — initiated by the GOP’s 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts — few African-Americans could vote in the Democrat-controlled South.  As a result, Nixon’s campaigning in southern states was perforce directed toward the people who could vote there, mostly the whites.

Regarding his decision to campaign in the South as some kind of cynical ploy is to ignore Nixon’s civil rights achievements while serving as Eisenhower’s vice president.  He was instrumental in breaking the Democrat filibuster against the 1957 Civil Rights Act and called for racial integration of public schools long before John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson did.

As I often say in my speeches, “The more we Republicans know about the history of our party, the more the Democrats will worry about the future of theirs.”  See www.grandoldpartisan.com for more information.

In the United States Senate, the indomitable James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma was very nearly alone in standing up to denounce the whole enterprise as a hoax, and in turn he was himself denounced by all right-thinking people as a scoundrel and a fool. There were, of course, scientists proficient in meteorology who entertained grave doubts, and some of them made a great fuss, but they were soon denied federal funding for further research, and young entrants into the profession quickly learned that if they wished to have successful careers it was incumbent on them to join the chorus who denounced global-warming skeptics as lackeys of the fossil fuels industry. The global-warming cabal was to the liberal democracies of our time what  Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his disciples were to biology in the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin.

When he became President, Barack Obama pledged to “roll back the specter of a warming planet” and “restore science to its rightful place,” implying – graceless as always – that the administration of George W. Bush had suppressed inconvenient scientific truths in the interests of ideology. In fact, Obama seems not to have understood what he was saying, for a specter is “an apparition inspiring dread,” and it is one of the principal functions of science to dispel illusions of this very sort; and, instead of debunking “the specter of a warming planet” and restoring “science to its rightful place” thereby, he embraced that specter and sought by way of inspiring dread in the American people to railroad his compatriots into subjecting the entire economy to the supervision of the administrative state.

One could, of course, argue that President Obama did not know any better – that, like Senators McCain and Graham, he believed the propaganda spread by the global-warming cabal. Such a presumption cannot, however, be sustained. By the time that our President left the United States for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen this past December, it had become clear that that the work done by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which formed the basis for the four reports issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was a sham – that the data was doctored, that the computer simulation was a fraud, and that systematic efforts were made by the most prominent climate scientists to corrupt the peer-review process and suppress legitimate criticism: all for the purpose of imposing a strait jacket on the world economy. In Copenhagen, President Obama could have acknowledged the truth: that some of the most prominent climate scientists had betrayed their calling, that the global-warming hypothesis remained, in fact, unproven, and that the reports issued by the IPCC provide no basis for the making of public policy. He could have recommended that there be further study, that the raw data collected and the computer code written be made available for inspection by all, and that research funds be apportioned equally between those who assert and those who deny that we are threatened by anthropogenic global warming. He did nothing of the sort, of course, and it was only thanks to the stubbornness of the Chinese that we have been spared the submission to the Senate of a treaty designed to hamstring the American economy. Even now our President remains committed to the passage of a cap-and-trade bill designed to achieve that end and to the use of the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to a similar end.

In the meantime, the scandal has deepened, as claim after claim included in the putatively authoritative reports issued by the IPCC have been proven groundless. The posture of the mainstream press within the United States in the face of all of this is arguably the scandal’s most shocking aspect. We are used to being lied to by politicians: Barack Obama is a recognizable type. We have encountered his like before. But the press, however partisan any given newspaper or television station may be, is supposed to be vigilant, and it is in its interest to be vigilant.

We buy newspapers and magazines, we watch television news and listen to radio programs because we want to know what is going on. Very few of us are apt to be satisfied with a press no more informative than was Pravda in the heyday of the Soviet Union. This scandal, worldwide in its proportions and profound in its import, was ready-made for enterprising reporters, and, to be fair, they have made their mark . . . in foreign countries such as Great Britain – where The Guardian, a left-wing daily firmly committed to the global warming hypothesis, has nonetheless distinguished itself by the vigor it has displayed in pursuing evidence of scientific fraud in this regard. None of the news outlets mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay has pursued the story. At best, long after the facts have come out, they have noted their deployment by the global-warming skeptics. Were it not for the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, Americans who limited their purview to the mainstream media would have hardly a clue as to what is happening.

This is, of course, part of a larger trend. The mainstream press has largely forgotten its function, and these days it flacks where it used to report. It is this that explains why fewer and fewer Americans subscribe to newspapers and magazines and watch the television networks listed above. And this explains why the internet has been such a boon. But, this fact notwithstanding, we are in a pickle – for, to date anyway, none of the operations on the internet that report the news have the resources requisite for pursuing such a story. We are, in fact, dependent on the foreign press.

Witness Der Spiegel – a German imitator of what Time was like when we still had newsmagazines in the United States. In its current issue, one can find a lengthy and devastating survey of the state of climate science entitled Climate Catastrophe: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research. It is a must-read: meticulous, cautious, and intelligently skeptical. Its authors do not claim that there is no such thing as global warming. They suspect that something of the sort may be taking place. What they insist on, however, are the limits of our current knowledge, the attempt by a politicized profession to pull a con, and the economic and social dangers associated with making radical shifts in public policy on the basis of unfounded speculation. We can now be confident that the global-warming hoax is history – for, if the pious purveyors of environmentalism in Germany have lost faith, the game is up. I doubt, however, that any of the politicians, press outlets, universities, or scientific journals associated with this scam will backtrack. My bet is that they quietly change the subject and that the perpetrators of the hoax get off scot free.

But this leaves one question unanswered. Why do we have to go abroad if we are to be well-informed concerning matters of public policy pertinent to our own well-being? Someone should put that question to those responsible for news content in the mainstream media. If they want to survive, they had better wake up.

John Podesta, Obama transition team co-chair and President of Center for American Progress (the group helped launch Media Matters in 2004). Podesta is a member of the ACORN Advisory Council.

…Hysterical Fox News commentators have blown this story up like a hot air balloon, and much of the rest of the media appear to believe that what Fox says goes. Andrew Alexander complains that “traditional news outlets like The Post simply don’t pay enough attention to conservative media or viewpoints.” But writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Rick Perlstein responds: “Why would a newspaper like the The Post be training its investigative focus on ACORN now? Whether you think ill or well of ACORN, they’re a very marginal group in the grand scheme of things and about as tied to the White House as the PTA.”

This right-wing stunt proved such powerful catnip to mainstream media bigfeet that amazingly, George Stephanopoulos thought it worth discussing with the President of the United States during a rare one-on-one interview opportunity. The president quite understandably explained that that he wasn’t following the story very closely, and that the country was dealing with more serious problems right now. (U.S. grants to ACORN, already suspended, account for literally 52 seconds of annual U.S. government spending, according to one careful estimate.) Stephanopoulos had nothing else to say. As though he were correcting himself, he continued, “Afghanistan is a serious problem facing the country right now.” Oh, yeah, Afghanistan….

To be fair, outside of nakedly ideological outfits, most of the reporters in the mainstream media behaved responsibly when the tapes emerged on right-wing radio shows and blogs. The tapes didn’t become legitimately newsworthy until the Census Bureau dropped ACORN from its efforts to collect 2010 census data. Initial reports even left out mention of the videotapes. But the videos are what attract media, particularly television, to this story, not government action against ACORN. Census and congressional moves to dissociate government from ACORN have become excuses to show these tapes again and again. News outlets have used these tapes even though they meet no reasonable journalistic standards.

The press has taken the release of the tapes as an opportunity to rehash the same handful of connections to ACORN that have been discussed and exaggerated ad nauseum by the openly conservative punditocracy. The Associated Press ran a piece by Sharon Theimer and Pete Yost on September 20 whose title asks, “Did ACORN Get Too Big for its Own Good?” The reporters give a history of the organization, focusing on any bad press the company has received since it began in 1970. They also refer to Barack Obama’s “long” relationship with the group. They illuminate three connections between the president and ACORN, including an endorsement by Bertha Lewis, the CEO. In addition to its being nonsense, these arguments assume that the videotapes signal a systemic failure on the part of ACORN, which has been neither investigated nor proven…

Read full article here.

They were not going to report this blockbuster unless they were forced to. And they were. What’s more, it ain’t over yet. Not every hint I dropped in that piece about what was to come has played itself out yet.Stay tuned.

When filmmaker and provocateur James O’Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN – the nation’s foremost “community organizers” – dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for – and getting – help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice. In the past, Mr. O’Keefe created brilliant social satire that rocked his college campus and even made its way on to the talk-radio and cable-news shows, but the magnitude of his latest adventure had the potential to rock the political establishment.

I was awed by Mr. O’Keefe’s guts and amazed by the footage, but explained that the mainstream media would try to kill this important and illuminating expose about a corrupt and criminal political racket, and that the well-funded political left would go into “war room” mode, with 25-year-old Mr. O’Keefe and 20-year-old cohort Miss Giles in the cross hairs. I felt I had a moral obligation to protect these young muckrakers from the left and from the media, and to devise a strategy that would force the media’s hand.

Once the American public saw with its own eyes the grotesque, common practices of ACORN’s housing offices, Mr. O’Keefe and Miss Giles could no longer be a legitimate focus of media scrutiny. Kill the messenger doesn’t work with the American people when they realize that the message is so devastating and honest. I think the video exposed the misuse of public funds and systemic manipulation of the tax code in the name of “helping the poor.”

If Mr. O’Keefe dumped the videos on YouTube, the political powers would have killed the expose before it got traction. I half-joked that he should secretly tape pitching the major television networks exclusive use of his videos for their nightly news broadcasts. But a simpler, less controversial method proved as fruitful.

I told him that in addition to launching his compelling and stylized Web videos, we needed to offer the full transcripts and audio to the public in the name of transparency, and to offer Fox News the full footage of each video before each was released.We had to devise a plan that would force the media to see the evidence before they had enough time to destroy these two idealistic 20-something truth seekers. Mr. O’Keefe agreed to post the full audio and full transcript of his video experiences at BigGovernment.com.

Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

Videos of five different ACORN offices in five separate cities would be released on five consecutive weekdays over a full week – Baltimore, Washington, New York, San Bernardino and San Diego. By dripping the videos out, we exposed to anyone paying attention that ACORN was lying through its teeth and that the media would look imbecilic continuing to trot out their hapless spokespeople.

Read the full article at the Washington Times.