Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"The American people already believe that corporate special interests and their lobbyists run the show around here. I mean, the halls are crawling with them. But that’s not enough. Now the Court says to the big banks, to the drug companies, to the insurance companies, ‘Hey, all bets are off, and it’s open season. Our elections are for sale.’ A law won’t fix this; we have to fix it in the Constitution. So today I’ll introduce a constitutional amendment so that we, the people, can take back our elections and our democracy."
-- Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1/28/10

In "Activist U.S. Supreme Court Makes It Official, We're Now 'The Corporate States of America'", Brad Friedman, along with so many others, expressed alarm over the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [PDF], as well he should have.

Notwithstanding the sophistries offered by Jan Witold Baran, who neglected to mention in his Jan. 26, 2010 New York Times editorial that he is a former general counsel for the Republican National Committee, it is clear from the broad language applied by the five-member majority of the Supreme Court that Citizens United calls into question the validity of all laws which seek to prohibit or even limit the ability of corporate bought-and-paid-for candidates to flood the airwaves with the corporate message, either directly or through corporate-purchased propaganda time slots; an ability that can drown out the right of citizens to see and hear those who do not tow the corporate line.

As I will explain in this first of a series of articles, this ruling perverts the very reason why the framers included "freedom of the press" in the First Amendment to the Constitutional amendments.

Unfortunately, as I will also explain in this series, the ruling in Citizens United was not unexpected. To the contrary, it is but the latest salvo in a 40 year, billionaire-funded assault on the very foundations of our constitutional republic and the rule of law.

A belated effort to reclaim our basic heritage has emerged via a move to amend the Constitution to overcome the devastating impact of Citizens United. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig argues that a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United will not be enough; that we have to overcome what he describes as "the economy of influence" which now controls Congress. Lessig has called for a new Constitutional Convention. Another activist group, The Peace Team, has denounced the decision in Citizens United as an "act of treason." The Peace Team features an on-line petition calling for the impeachment of the five members of the Supreme Court who signed onto the majority opinion.

Regardless of where one stands on these efforts, a full appreciation of the big picture may be required before an effective movement can counter the well-funded and well organized assault on liberty...

Following the recent federal felony arrest of his Rightwing dirty trickster employee, Rightwing propagandist and flim-flam artist Andrew Breitbart has had difficulty keeping his story straight. In two recent radio interviews, Breitbart offered two directly contradictory descriptions of his business relationship with the 25-year-old accused felon who remains on payroll while facing federal charges.

During a recent live appearance on the Internet radio show African-American Conservatives (AACONS), Breitbart was asked about his ongoing relationship with James O'Keefe. O'Keefe was recently arrested in Louisiana, along with three others (one the son of the acting U.S. Attorney), for allegedly heading up a scheme to "maliciously interfere" with the telephone system of Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu.

He's "technically not salaried," Breitbart told AACONS host Marie Stroughter during the interview last week, in reply to her question about O'Keefe.

Breitbart's answer, however, was in direct contradiction to an an admission he offered on-air on the nationally syndicated radio program of fellow Rightwing propagandist Hugh Hewitt just weeks ago, on January 26th, on the night of O'Keefe's arrest.

In response to Hewitt's query about whether O'Keefe was "in your employ in any way," Breitbart admitted that O'Keefe was "paid a fair salary" for content published on Breitbart's various websites.

So, according to Breitbart, his accused felon employee O'Keefe is both "technically not salaried" and "paid a fair salary" at the same time. A neat trick.

So, was he lying to Hewitt on January 26th? Or to Stroughter on February 9th?

Or, perhaps there's a third way for Breitbart to try and thread his impossible needle in his continuing successful series of hoaxes on both the American public and the mainstream corporate media. He could pull out a tortured, Clintonian reliance on what the meaning of the word "salary" is...

It's up to the wingnuts. If they want to keep lying about Obama, then we'll do our best to set the record straight. If they want to bring up legitimate criticism, and there's plenty of it, then we'd likely join them, and we could all have an Obama bashing party together. But they're not that smart.

So as long as the wingnut media --- and thus, virtually the entire corporate media --- insist on using the people's airwaves to lie to the people (eg., Rush Limbaugh continues to repeat every day what a "complete failure" the economic stimulus package has been), I guess we'll just have to keep countering that phony message by posting the truth in order to try to offer some balance to the unending stream of lies from the GOP and their extremely effective mouthpieces across the near-entirety of the corporate media.

Rachel Maddow did the same last week in her lead-up piece to Obama's first State of the Union address, in which she brutally attacked the Administration's call for a partial spending freeze, even as the economy, thanks in no small part to Government investment, struggles to come out of its tailspin.

Before her critique however (which I hope you'll watch in full --- it's embedded below), she also pointed out the salient, indisputable facts of how responsible actions taken by the Obama Administration, whether you liked them or not --- and as opposed by virtually every single Republican in Congress --- have, in fact, with all of their many failings, helped shore up, and even reverse for now, what had been a near-death spiral by the time Obama finally took office.

Here are two charts from her report which highlight that point quite simply, and help to counter the loud, GOP-spun political/partisan nonsense echoed, naturally, by the gullible tea baggers...

[NOTE: Since Maddow's report last week, the GDP figures for the 4th quarter of last year have now been announced and the up trend continues. As her original chart included data only through the 3rd quarter of last year, we've augmented that original chart below to reflect the recently announced 5.7% growth in GDP for the 4th quarter of '09]:

Love him or hate him, or anything in between, recognition of the overall effect of the broad points of Obama's emergency economic policies --- quickly passed at an historic moment of looming disaster --- is due. At least along with any honest appraisal of those policies.

Maddow's entire report, both praising and critiquing Obama and those policies --- something known as "fairness and balance" --- can be watched below...

[UPDATE: Complete video of Obama Q&A with House GOP members now embedded at end of article.]

Via Olbermann this afternoon at dKos:

The event this afternoon, where Obama spent an hour and a half taking any and all questions from GOP House Members was, indeed, remarkable. As I tweeted at the time, "Can u imagine Bush ever doing anything like that? Ever?!"

If you missed it, we'll try to get video, or links to it, posted here shortly. Apparently, tweets emptywheel, "so many people want to see Obama's GOP talk that they've crashed CSPAN's servers. Has that ever happened before?"

It was sober, reasonable, helpful and historic and Obama came across as extraordinarily reasonable and Presidential. It was little surprise then that Fox "News," I read, cut away from the historic moment to...do something else.

[Update: Video of all 85 minutes of Obama's "Question Time" is now posted here with transcript, and embedded in full at the end of this article.]

A few clips follow below, courtesy of TPM's excellent coverage, along with an extended segment from their report. In one of the clips, for example, Obama tells the Republicans to portraying the "pretty centrist" health care bill as "some sort of Bolshevik plot"...

Matt Drudge's poodle, anti-ACORN propagandist, GOP operative, and deranged wingnut Internet death threatener, Andrew Breitbart, is apparently hoping to become the new Orly Taitz.

Today's insane interview with David Shuster on MSNBC, discussing the felony arrest of his employee/operative James O'Keefe for allegedly attempting to manipulate the telephones of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) earlier this week, goes a long way towards that goal. Lookin' good, Andy! Keep up the brilliant "journalism"!

Josh Marshall notes about the interview that it was "truly the most unhinged performance I've seen since Shuster made a laughing stock of and pretty much put an end to the fifteen minutes of fame of [Queen of the Obama 'Birthers'] Orly Taitz."

"At some level I admire Breitbart's insistence on turning any question about anything into an attack based on why the federal government hasn't turned itself over entirely to investigating ACORN," Marshall adds, "But this performance was definitely in shark-jumping territory. For the ages."

Indeed. Though despite Crazy Andy's seething rage about a lack of criminal convictions against ACORN, even as two recent independent investigations found no criminal wrong-doing by the pro-voter, pro-American Dream community group in the highly-doctored, and apparently illegally-obtained video tapes that Breitbart and O'Keefe posted for the U.S. media to broadcast widely, he's adamant that the rest of the world needs to retract, um, everything, while his continued, unsubstantiated allegations against, um, everybody else are just fine.

Unfortunately, Shuster didn't ask Andy about the admissions that he'd made on the night of O'Keefe's arrest, when he concurred that "Lots of people work for lots of corporations, and do dumb and sometimes illegal things that are not within the scope of their employment."

The wingnut that he was concurring with, Hugh Hewitt, was talking about Crazy Andy's employment of the accused felon O'Keefe. But the irony that they'd both just explained why ACORN isn't necessarily responsible for an employee of theirs who defrauds ACORN itself --- who is turned in by ACORN themselves to officials for prosecution --- apparently escaped both geniuses as they panicked to try and save Breitbart's quickly crumbling propaganda empire.

Anyway, here's the video of Shuster with Crazy Andy "jumping the shark" on MSNBC today...

Guest blogged by Frank Schaeffer (with a little help from Rachel Maddow)

I am the father of a Marine who served his country with honor in Afghanistan and Iraq. In that role --- as part of the military family --- I call on anyone who cares about this country to speak out against the Republican Party, its leaders and followers and tell the truth: they are trying to cash in on the Detroit/terror attempt in a way that has clearly crossed a line. They are over the line of not just good taste, but into an area that has to be called what it is: unpatriotic, un-American cynicism on a new level.

I was going to write a post on this but Rachel Maddow said it better on MSNBC last night...

Please watch and pass on. One last thing: why is Rachel Maddow the only journalist who seems to be doing her job on this (and so many other matters!) of actually fact-checking?

UPDATE/ADDENDUM FROM BRAD: With all due respect to the indispensable Rachel, and our friend Frank Schaeffer, Glenn Greenwald and a few others in the blogosphere, were also early on this particular beat, as the non-Rachel corporate media were predictably performing their usual failure. And, if we may say so ourselves, we had a word (okay, a coarse and infuriated rant) or two on these very same matters, while guest hosting last night's Mike Malloy Show ourselves. That rant, at least a good chunk of it, can be downloaded here [MP3] or heard by hitting the play button below...

ANOTHER UPDATE FROM BRAD: Finally, a Democrat manages to grow a pair, and pushes back --- loudly and directly --- at the outrageous, appalling, hypocritical, anti-American attacks from Cheney and the rest of the America-hating Right...

Sue, Bill, sue! Enough is enough! Go get 'em!...

(Hat-tip @Frank_Schaeffer)

Guest blogged by Frank Schaeffer

Following my recent appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, where I was talking about my new book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism) and where I warned her viewers that that the religious right is now “trawling for assassins” with the use of inflammatory items like T-Shirts calling for President Obama’s death, I got a lot of email. What is interesting to note is just how unimaginative and downright stupid the hate mail from the right is.

Speaking of “trawling” (this time for reactions to President Obama) I’d unwittingly conducted a little experiment without meaning to: a basic intelligence test of the right and left...

The wingnuttery continues to devolve. Last night, Rachel Maddow covered, among other recently related points, the new Rightwing "Pray for Obama" movement supporting, and selling merchandise in support of, Psalms 109:8 which begins this way: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office," and continues with "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

Frank Schaeffer, repentant former rightwing fundamentalist evangelical, and now a contributor here at The BRAD BLOG, was on her show last night to discuss that point, and where it seems to signal that things may be frighteningly headed.

He also raised another point, in condemnation of critics on the Left, with which I'll offer a slight quibble. The video of the full Maddow interview follows, along with a crucial excerpt from the text transcript, and my thoughts on where I disagree with one of Frank's now-repeated assertions...

My latest piece at the Guardian today, as written under the auspices of the Commonweal Institute (where I am a Fellow),seems to have stirred up the Tea Baggery on both sides of the pond.

I always love the commenters on columns I do at the Guardian. My favorite exchange there so far this morning begins with commenter "Zounds" objecting to my points with: "Active discourse also requires a wider range of intellectual influences than all the American news channels offer."

To which "jcpenny", apparently an American, replied: "I've never seen British Tellie to provide the variety the American Tellie does. Perhaps our forebarers had a reason for leaving?"

To which "Zounds" replied hilariously in turn: "I believe the lack of variety on British TV was indeed the primary reason the Pilgrim Fathers gave."

:-) Add your own two cents and read the full column here...

Please see below for Jeremy Scahill at The Nation who, last week, covered the outrageous hypocrisy of federal legislation targeting ACORN (who committed no crimes), while the top 100 government contractors, who made "nearly $300 billion from federal contracts in 2007 alone" paid some "$26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse".

By way of contrast with the federally favored criminal corporations, Scahill notes, "Over the past fifteen years, ACORN has received just $53 million in federal funds, much of it for low-income housing." Despite that, "In mid-September all but seventy-five House Democrats and seven senators voted with their Republican colleagues to bar the group from receiving federal funds."

The corporate welfare queens, of course, face no punitive legislative by Congress and are allowed to carry out their waste, fraud, abuse and often extraordinarily criminal behavior while on the tax-payer dole and nobody --- Republican or Democrat --- bats an eye.

Following the Scahill quotage on these points below, you'll find a must-see video clip of Florida's tenacious Rep. Alan Grayson, handing it to his Republican colleagues in a committee hearing this week, for their attempt to pass an "unconstitutional bill of attainder" meant solely to punish the GOP's favorite stalking-horse, ACORN. (See Rachel Maddow's expert coverage on the unconstitutionality of such bills, as posted late last month, for more details.)

Grayson's flat-out, apologetically cold-hearted unwillingness to yield the floor to the disingenuous wingnut cabal, and his shaming of them for pushing such an outrageously unconstitutional bill, is something to behold. Would that he were the model for what all Democrats sounded and acted like on behalf of the people. [Hat-tip to BRAD BLOG reader David Lasagna for the heads-up on that video. Now go watch it below!]

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow continued her series last night, on the "purely political smear campaign" which ACORN has faced since registering nearly 2 million legal voters over the last decade. In the third installment of her continuing series, she focused on the ACORN smears over non-existent "voter fraud," which were at the heart of the U.S. Attorney scandal.

Before being joined by former Republican U.S. Attorney from New Mexico David Iglesias --- fired by the Bush White House because he refused to bring fraudulent voter fraud cases against Democrats, as we covered in exclusive detail in March of 2007 --- Maddow notes accurately: "No accusation has ever been substantiated that anyone ever registered by ACORN ever voted fraudulently."

She added astutely: "The Bush White House viewed voter fraud as the mother of all wedge issues. It's paying its dividends today, and remarkably, Democrats are playing right along with it."...

Maddow's excellent previous reports in this series are here:

Thursday: The truth about the extraordinary GOP lies and media failure concerning ACORN.
Friday: The hypocrisy (and unconstitutionality) of defunding ACORN while groups like Halliburton and Blackwater, which committed actual crimes, like murder and real fraud, still receive more federal funding in a day than ACORN has in its lifetime.

This is all much like watching a broadcast news version replay of the last 5 years here at The BRAD BLOG. And we're lovin' it. Thank you again, Rachel! Please keep it up! As "Annie" said in It's a Wonderful Life: "'Bout time one of you lunkheads said it!"

Following on Rachel Maddow's tremendous coverage last Thursday of the GOP's years-long witch-hunt of ACORN, and the media's abysmal job at telling the truth about the lies used to smear the community organization, the MSNBC journalist calls it an "outrage" and kept her promise of following up with another episode on Friday. The video is below.

We welcome her coverage of so much of what we have been reporting, sometimes almost completely alone, for years, and as further detailed now by a new academic study titled "Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong."

Maddow continued her long-overdue exposé, by examining the "Defund ACORN Act of 2009," which recently passed both houses of Congress by large margins, after sting videos showing low-level ACORN employees behaving stupidly (but breaking no laws) were created and posted by rightwing operatives. As she notes, the Congressional bill appears to be both unconstitutional, and incredibly hypocritical, given that other, still-federally funded organizations --- such as Halliburton, Blackwater, and many, many more --- often receive far more federal funding in a single day than ACORN has received during the organization's entire lifetime.

Furthermore, those other organizations, which still receive billions from the U.S. government, were actually found to have committed actual crimes, such as millions of dollars worth of fraud, have been charged with murder and the deaths of U.S. troops, and even involve child prostitution and sex slavery!

It's odd that Fox "News," Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, et al. (including the bulk of the non-wingnut media!) have yet to point these matters out, isn't it? So thanks to Maddow, again, for doing so, along with credit to both Joe Conason, who pointed out some of this hypocrisy recently at Salon and, yes, ourselves, who similarly opined at the UK's Guardian.

Be sure to see her must-watch Thursday report back here. Her Friday report follows below, along with our repeated "thank you" to Rachel, and offer to help on any number of still-unreported points in the continuing GOP witch-hunt that both the media and Democrats have embarrassingly fallen for, and about which we have been reporting for years...

UPDATE 9/29/09: The third report in Maddow's must-see series is now posted here...

I was delighted (an understatement) to see Rachel Maddow on Thursday night jump into coverage of ACORN --- finally --- by highlighting so much of what we've been reporting here, sometimes completely alone, for years!

She details the facts about the GOP's long-waged phony war against the right's "most reliable trumped-up boogeyman" (using language akin to that in my recent article in the UK's Guardian on the recent rightwing hit job on ACORN and the Democrats' pathetic capitulation to it). Maddow goes on to note the corporate mainstream media's gullibility in "reporting" the wingnuts' out-and-out lies about the group while failing, miserably, for years, to note the truth.

The truth, of course, is that ACORN is responsible for registering millions of legal low and middle-income citizens (read: Democratic-leaning, as the GOP sees them) to vote. The truth is that when they find potentially fraudulent voter registration forms submitted by a handful of their 13,000 employees, it is they who alert authorities about the fraud, and turn both the forms (as required by law), and the workers who defrauded them in to officials so they can be investigated. The truth is that there is not a single recorded instance of voter fraud committed by any illegally registered voters via ACORN. Not one.

"The more that I look into the misleading nature of the charges against ACORN," Maddow notes, "not just from people from whom I expect misleading charges, but from reporters and people in the mainstream media who ought to know better, the angrier I get. ... And I think we're going to cover the lies about ACORN over a number of shows in the upcoming days." THANK YOU RACHEL!!!

Her report follows on a new study, "Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong," just out from Occidental College and the University of Northern Iowa, detailing, as she describes it, "the embarrassing extent to which the media has gotten the ACORN story really really wrong." (I've yet to read the report, but am looking forward to it!)

I can't recommend this video enough. And, as Maddow promises to continue her coverage on this story, let's hope she'll take a serious look at snake-oil salesman Thor Hearne, his direct connections to Karl Rove and the Bush White House, and the unconscionable astroturf group, American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), which The BRAD BLOG outed years ago and has been covering ever since. ACVR, of course, was the phony tax-exempt "non-partisan" organization set up after the 2004 election to lead the disinformation campaign against ACORN and disenfranchise legal voters by issuing propaganda meant to fool Americans into instituting unconstitutional photo ID requirements at the polling place, despite the fact that some 20-30 million legal U.S. voters --- largely Democratic-leaning voters --- are likely to be disenfranchised in the process!

Yes, Rachel, "this story gets [us] mad" too! Has for years! Please give me a shout if I can help. Got some swell stuff I've never reported on this that I'd be happy to share with you! Would be delighted to!

CORRECTION: Thanks to alert reader "TM," we had originally noted that ACVR was formed after the 2000 election. We should have said after the 2004 election, when Hearne first appeared to give testimony to then-Rep. Bob Ney's House Administrative committee, as the only supposed "voting rights" group called to testify in the only Congressional hearing convened following the election, to supposedly discuss its many problems. Hearne represented himself only as a "long-time voting rights advocate" at the hearing, failing to note to the committee, or for the record, that he had been the national general counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. The "non-partisan" ACVR was formed by Hearne and former RNC communications director Jim Dyke, who would later go on to work in Dick Cheney's office, and now represents various Republican candidates. Other than that, they were completely non-partisan. Oh, and they never disclosed whom they received nearly $1 million dollars from when they initially started up. See BradBlog.com/ACVR for much more in our years-long coverage of these anti-democracy bamboozlers.

UPDATE 9/28/09: The second report in Maddow's must-see series is now posted here...

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

Last week, in his address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama correctly noted:

That was the easy part. Anyone who has paid attention understands that the core problem lies in the profit motives of the private insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Thus, the President's diagnosis of the U.S. health care system was accurate, but did he prescribe "change we can believe in?"...