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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA': The Chamber of Commerce vs. climate science; Is solar cheaper than nuclear?; Hospital study: The high cost of dirty air; Satellite photos show decades of Mountaintop Removal destruction; Global warming skeptics distract from security risks; Architects designing cities for global warming adaptation; Natural Gas lobby challenging coal; Independent board to review work of top climate panel; Rise in anti-science cyber-bullying... PLUS: What will climate science learn from 'Climategate' investigations? CRU's Phil Jones admits emails were 'awful' ...

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It's not particularly worth my time, or anybody's time (unless they are involved in suing or pressing charges against the GOP hoaxsters), to get into the detailed weeds on how the ACORN "pimp" hoax videos were doctored to show something other than what they really were, in comparison to what the text transcripts (which may or may not be accurate) actually show, since:

• the entire scam was a political hit job and a scam from the jump, and;
• since accused felon James O'Keefe and his employer and publisher Andrew Breitbart have refused to release the unedited video tapes, and;
• since three investigations (one from the Congressional Research Service, one from MA's former Attorney General, and the latest, just this week from the Brooklyn, NY District Attorney) have all found no criminal wrongdoing by the low-level ACORN employees caught on secret video, and;
• since nobody but low-level workers and volunteers are even seen on the tapes, and;
• since ACORN immediately fired those who violated the organization's own written protocols.

As The BRAD BLOG has been detailing over the last several weeks, the highly-edited, heavily-overdubbed, secretly (and likely illegally) taped videos, and those who published them, have already proven to have discredited themselves.

Now that O'Keefe's ACORN "pimp" hoax has been acknowledged, even by Andrew Breitbart, as a deceptive fraud --- where he once called it Pulitzer Prize-worthy "journalism" he now compares it to Borat --- it doesn't seem to matter to the same rightwing bloggers who trumpeted it in the first place that O'Keefe lied about playing his now-infamous 70's-era blaxploitation "pimp" character in ACORN offices. What's important, those foolish enough to keep backing O'Keefe and Breitbart now claim, is not that the purveyor of the information has been shown to be a fraud himself, but what he purports to have caught ACORN workers saying and doing on his highly-edited video productions.

But even those charges don't hold up to even the quickest scrutiny...

This from a panel of today's Tom Tomorrow strip, titled "Too Much Crazy," depicting New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt "as a weasel"...

Much more crazy in the full strip.

The quote in the above panel is taken from the mindblowing emails Hoyt sent to me recently, as one of his reasons for not recommending the "paper of record" issue retractions for their repeatedly inaccurate and misreported coverage of the James O'Keefe/Andrew Breitbart ACORN video "pimp" hoax, as The BRAD BLOG has now been covering for weeks.

In addition to the absurd justifications that Hoyt (who can be emailed at Public@NYTimes.com) offered for refusing to responsibly recommend corrections, the paper's Senior Editor for Standards, Greg Brock, offered equally absurd reasons for standing by their reporting earlier, including O'Keefe's appearance on Fox News, "wearing what HE said was the same exact costume he wore to ACORN's offices."

"If there is a correction to be made, it seems it would start with Mr. O'Keefe himself. We believe him," Brock (who can be emailed at SeniorEditor@NYTimes.com) incredibly asserted via emails we posted here. "Therefore there is nothing for us to correct."

Meanwhile, back in Clay County, Kentucky, where election officials (including the county clerk, a district court judge, and the school superintendent) were arrested last year, and are now on trial, accused of having "fix[ed] elections for decades," a "precinct worker testified...that top election officers in the county taught her how to change people's choices on voting machines to steal votes in the May 2006 primary." The vote stealing was accomplished on ES&S touch-screen electronic voting machines, without the knowledge of legitimate voters, after they'd left the booth thinking they had cast their votes.

The scheme also included Republicans changing their party registration to Democratic in order to serve as Democratic poll judges and officers on Election Day, as has been alleged elsewhere (for example, in Ohio in 2004)...

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA': Rising threat of even more strains of antibiotic-resistant superbacteria; Massive new iceberg could change ocean circulation, weather; Climate scientists quizzed by British lawmakers; Scientists: World warming unhindered by cold spells; Three Myths about Water; Human testing at heart of debate over U.S. toxics law... PLUS: How the G.O.P. Goes Green ...

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

Via Ben Smith at Politico:

The New York Daily News adds:

Well, what a stunner. Still no retraction from you, New York Times? Will you even bother to report this news this time, after failing to report thatformer MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger found the same [PDF] months ago, as did the Congressional Research Service, even as you continued mis-reporting the ACORN "pimp" hoax ever since?

UPDATE: This new post from the NY Daily News seems to indicate the D.A. was able to look at the complete unedited video which Breitbart and O'Keefe have otherwise refused to release publicly (see our Exclusive Video of Breitbart discussing this from earlier today) and found, according to "a law enforcement source", as we've long argued: "They edited the tape to meet their agenda"!...

UPDATE 3:24PM ACORN issues a statement following the announcement from the King County, D.A. noting what The BRAD BLOG has been reporting for years:

Their full statement follows below...

- Guest Blogged by Mike Stark of StarkReports.com

I recently attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in D.C., with video camera in hand, to report on the attendees. I was particularly interested in interviewing James O'Keefe, the miscreant (and accused felon) responsible for the ACORN video media hoax that The BRAD BLOG has been meticulously detailing for several weeks, including the important focus on how the mainstream corporate media (the old-media) have been had by the scam.

O'Keefe's phony "pimp" story has been debunked, but, as Brad Friedman has shown, the old-media remain remarkably reticent to admit their errors, and the publisher of the videos, O'Keefe's employer and promoter Andrew Breitbart, has been unwilling to help them off the hook. Witness the outrageous email responses from the NYTimes' Senior Editor for Standards Greg Brock and then from their Public Editor Clark Hoyt, when it was shown to them that "the paper of record" had been had --- that O'Keefe had never "visited Acorn offices...dressed so outlandishly" in the now-infamous "pimp" costume as the paper had reported, as O'Keefe had represented, and as Breitbart himself had claimed in his own column, to the public.

While I didn't get the chance to speak with O'Keefe, I did catch up with his partner in fraud, Hannah Giles. Alas, she was surrounded by a protective coterie and fled without answering any questions when one of her entourage recognized me.

But then my luck turned. I trekked to the basement to cover the "XPAC" party and found myself standing shoulder to shoulder with Breitbart, O'Keefe's promoter, publisher, and employer, and owner of the website which launched the infamously damaging, misleading, deceptive, and highly doctored video tapes. I had previously questioned Breitbart at a press conference at the National Press Club press last October. He's had a pretty easy ride of it since then, facing questioning only from a largely adulatory press.

Though old-media, as Brad has shown, have been remarkably reluctant to demand answers to hard questions from Breitbart --- or any of the players involved in the ACORN secret video scheme --- I felt it important to do so for a number of reasons. The results were revealing, both in Breitbart's insanely manic demeanor, and in the substantive content of his answers to my questions.

Ultimately, as I believe you'll find in the video, he reveals a lot about his own editorial judgment, professionalism, and reliability --- none of it is good...

The Breitbart/O'Keefe media fraud has been wildly successful for the pair, helping to launch Breitbart's BigGovernment.com site late last year. But, unfortunately, it's hurt a great number of innocents.

Lost in the outrage against the New York Times for having fallen for the scam without bothering to fact-check, as The BRAD BLOG has been detailing for the past several weeks, is the fact that Breitbart and his ward O'Keefe have accomplished a despicable goal: They've all but destroyed an organization committed to helping those Americans most in need. Real people --- thousands of children amongst them --- will suffer hardship as a direct consequence of Breitbart's and O'Keefe's mendacious and malicious hoax, and singularly partisan political agenda. When will the media get around to telling that story?

And what of the damage that disreputable propagandists like Breitbart and O'Keefe bring to the real citizen journalists in the new media --- those of us striving not to sell a political agenda under false pretenses, but, rather, hoping to document facts, truth, and on-the-record positions of those who would corrupt our system through disingenuousness, self-enrichment, and lies?...

[Ed note: This blog item was originally published on 2/6/2010. I'm re-dating it to today, to let you know that my full Hustler article, sans graphics, has now been posted online at the LarryFlynt.com site.. Edmonds has now named names, but the media won't investigate. Why would that be? I look at the possibilities in my article. --- As well, the Mike Connell feature story in February's Maxim, mentioned below, is also now posted online. -BF]

You're welcome. My 2000+ word article on former FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds is now featured in the March 2010 edition of Hustler. Sorry, she's wearing all her clothes. Go buy it anyway.

The article brings the story of Edmonds, who was twice-gagged by the Bush Administration's outrageous use/abuse of the "States Secrets Privilege," fully up to date following her naming of names, finally, under oath, in remarkable testimony last summer. (Some of those names: Hastert, Burton, Blunt, Lantos, Schakowsky, Wolfowitz, Perle, Grossman, etc.)

The 'rave reviews' just keep pouring in for the massive fails by New York Times Senior Editor for Standards Greg Brock and Public Editor (what they call their ombudsman) Clark Hoyt to recommend corrections for the repeated misreporting of the ACORN video "pimp" hoax.

At least one of them is absolutely devastating in highlighting both the extraordinary hypocrisy and sheer stupidity demonstrated by the "paper of record" in refusing to set the record straight on its incontrovertibly inaccurate coverage of the false "pimp" story peddled by rightwing propagandists last year...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Great white sharks more scarce than endangered tigers; Vermont says no to nukes; End of the line for Hummer ... PLUS: Inhofe's war on science ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA': Republicans calling for a 'carbon tax'???; Guilt-free, compostable plastic; State hiring freezes stall fed weatherization program; Big loan for Big Solar; Alaskan villagers first U.S. 'climate refugees'; Venture capitalists slam GOP campaign to halt CA climate law; Great Atlantic Garbage Patch found; Navy to study toxic water deaths at Camp Lejeune, NC; Tea baggers spread climate science disinfo... PLUS: Climate denier industry: the same folks who denied tobacco and acid rain...

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After not hearing from New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt for nearly a week --- during which I'd sent him more and more indisputable evidence that Andrew Breitbart employee James O'Keefe never played his infamous "pimp" character in the offices of ACORN --- he responded with a couple of blistering charges. The email was sent several hours after we'd published our article yesterday, detailing his various untenable justifications for not recommending retractions by the "paper of record" for multiple undeniably fallacious articles on O'Keefe and Breitbart's discredited hoax ACORN "pimp" videos.

Hoyt equated our use of offering independently verifiable and incontrovertible hard evidence, demonstrating the Times, their Senior Editor for Standards Greg Brock, and Hoyt himself were simply wrong, time and again, in falling for the rightwing hoax, and my attempt at seeing accountability for it, with a "political agenda" on par with the Rightwing propagandists who ran the dishonest partisan smear campaign to destroy ACORN.

The fall-out in the blogosphere has been quickly broadening since The BRAD BLOG's exclusive yesterday. Responses from a number of influential blogs and bloggers include a call for Hoyt to step down as the paper's ombudsman, a blistering description of this particular rationalization of his [emphasis Hoyt's]...

...as "unforgivable," and the charge that "the paper allowed its desire to seem 'fair' to the right trump its commitment to being fair to the facts." Also, an online petition calling for NYTimes retractions was just launched. (More details and fall-out below.)

Hoyt wrote back in response to the "Last Chance" note I'd sent him on Monday, offering a final opportunity to re-consider his previous assessments, in which he'd found that no correction was in order for the paper, "because that would require conclusive evidence that The Times was wrong, which I haven't seen"...

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA': Is the Bloom Box really a "breakthrough"?; Solar Power in the Remotest Places; Dams to be removed on Klamath River; Shipper fined for SF Bay oil spill; Google approved to become electric utility; Top scientists confirm climate consensus; Scientist: "Climate changes are proven fact"; Fact-checking the "Skeptical Environmentalist; George Will's latest column is just sad; Cyber-bullying, death threats for Australian climate scientists ... PLUS: Journalistic malpractice on global warming...

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

The New York Times' independent Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, after sending me an email originally standing by the paper's misreporting of the James O'Keefe ACORN 'pimp' story, now describes the rightwing activist's misrepresentation of his highly-edited and heavily-overdubbed hit videos as "journalistically unethical."

O'Keefe's deceptive editing of those infamous tapes implied that he had presented himself in ACORN offices as a 70's-era blaxploitation "pimp." It was the eye-popping, media-friendly, marquee headline that news outlets, including the Times, latched onto and ate up. Except that it never happened. The tapes were purposely manipulated in order to give the appearance that ACORN workers were so dumb they didn't even recognize that skinny little white kid as a phony pimp. And that's exactly how O'Keefe, and his employer Andrew Breitbart who published the misleading tapes on his websites, wanted them to be perceived.

We've spent the last several weeks here reporting and demonstrating how the O'Keefe/Breitbart ACORN video hoax was exactly that --- a political partisan scam that was publicized uncritically by the New York Times, and dozens of otherwise reputable outlets.

Despite the Times' repeatedly misreporting that O'Keefe was dressed or posed as a "pimp" while meeting with ACORN employees in those videos, and even after being shown in no uncertain terms that he did not, the Times' Public Editor has declined to recommend the paper retract its reporting on this story. The coverage at the "paper of record" undoubtedly helped lead to Congressional passage of federal legislation attempting to defund the community organization, and helped to bring on a subsequently crippling decline in other funding sources for the non-profit group which serves to provide support for low- and middle-income American families.

At the end of the remarkable email exchange between Hoyt and myself (published in full at the end of this article), he says he recommended only that "Times editors ...avoid language that says or suggests that O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp when he captured the ACORN employees on camera."

That, even though...

Hannah Giles played the "prostitute" in the highly-edited, heavily-overdubbed, secretly-taped ACORN sting videos, while James O'Keefe played her college student, aspiring politician boyfriend trying to save her from abuse at the hands of a dangerous pimp. She seems very nice

Unfortunately, she's also the same person who joined --- likely horribly disinformed --- in to the GOP's anti-ACORN junta (attacking, for purely partisan political reasons, those who help the least fortunate in our society), and then explained afterwards that "one day I was jogging after work and I saw an ACORN, um, I was like, hmm, you know, I’ve never seen them before, I don’t like them."

So when, in this Max Blumenthal video compilation of his weekend with the loons at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), she seems to confuse "minstrel show" with "menstrual cycle," I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise. As she did with Washington Independent's David Weigel last week, she also, again, confirms that O'Keefe never wore his "pimp" costume into ACORN offices, despite the lies from propagandist Andrew Breitbart (employer of both Giles and O'Keefe, and publisher of the videos) about that point and others when he sold his original blockbuster, but fake, story to the public and one media outlet after another who bought it all hook, line and uncritical sinker...

As the "paper of record" the New York Times has still refused to correct their multiple, blatant misreports of this story, which helped lead to Congress passing unconstitutional legislation to defund ACORN, and with the reported news today that the national community group has been structurally broken by the loss of funds in the wake of the disreputable partisan hit job, the points that Digby made yesterday, as to why she believes the O'Keefe/Breitbart lie is an important one, are worth noting...

My promise to "Tea Partiers" (the phony ones, not the real Ron Paul ones who were legitimately Tea Partying long before you Tea Baggers even began to completely misunderstand what the Boston Tea Party was about):

When you start calling for accountability for those in the Bush/Cheney Torture Operation who directly and indirectly violated both the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law, I'll start taking you and your claims about defending the Constitution seriously.

Until then, you are phony patriots and easily-played partisan stooges, who don't give a damn about our Constitution and the values that this country actually stands for.

A few reminders --- among many more --- about the real Tea Parties, and the man who inspired them, while being utterly marginalized by the GOP --- and who, ironically enough, was the runaway winner of this weekend's CPAC straw poll for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination --- are below for those clueless Tea Bagging pretenders referenced above...