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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Earthquake for Chile, storms for Haiti; Winter Olympics over for Vancouver?; Climate change hits coffee ... PLUS: Van Jones is back with a special message for Glenn Beck ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

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...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport

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!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

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...

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

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"...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Green medals at the Vancouver Olympics; Early spring in Japan; Slow boats to China; EPA under fire ... PLUS: Climate change legislation --- not dead yet! ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

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...

Just a quick reminder that none of The BRAD BLOG's recent series of detailed reporting on the MSM's failure to properly report on the ACORN "pimp" video hoaxes is actually about Andrew Breitbart, in truth. He'd love it to be. But it's not. He's just one overly-influential cancer cell in the quickly metastasizing illness over-taking the mainstream media. That illness is best illustrated, of late, by the willingness of the once-credible New York Times (and many others) to treat Andy --- as well as his band of GOP propaganda mongers and dirty tricksters --- as a respectable source, rather than the confirmed liar, desperate flip-flopper, self-defining hypocrite, and Republican con-man that he is.

But since the "Liberal MSM" are not yet ready to cop to their egregious and repeated errors on that front, and since we're feeling generous today for some reason, we'll just take Andy at his tweeted word from last week when he sputtered: "@TheBradBlog U do understand that if I were least bit worried about your line of questioning Id ignore U, right? Do U not get that?"

Yeah, we get that. Which must be why, during his series of insane, paranoid, meltdown rants (see videos below) at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in D.C. all weekend long, where he fingered an imaginary Vast Leftwing Conspiracy at the heart of his epic fail, he forgot to mention The BRAD BLOG for some reason!

It's as if he were entirely "ignoring" our "line of questioning" for some reason.

That, even as he was forced to admit at the very top of his Saturday morning speech at CPAC --- undoubtedly due to having finally been sold out by his own fake "prostitute," Hannah Giles, the day before --- that he did, "apparently," lie about his phony ACORN "pimp" story...

Speaking to Washington Independent reporter David Weigel today at CPAC, Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute in James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart's infamous, highly-doctored, heavily-overdubbed, secretly-taped, ACORN hit videos, confirms what we've been reporting for several weeks here: O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp in the offices of ACORN.

Reports Weigel today [emphasis added]:

"B-roll" refers to footage shot separately and later inserted during editing, as frequently seen in movies and television. E.g., an overhead helicopter shot of Las Vegas, used to establish where the scene takes place, before cutting to the interior of a casino where the main character is seen playing cards at a table.

Giles' admission is in stark contrast to:

• O'Keefe's knowingly deceptive appearances on Fox "News" "dressed exactly in the same outfit that he wore in these ACORN offices up and down the Eastern Seaboard";
• Breitbart's out-and-out lies in his own 9/21/09 column to help promote the videos by claiming they show O'Keefe and Giles "going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN ... dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for - and getting - help for various illegal activities";
• Breitbart's 2/15/10 tweet to The BRAD BLOG claiming that he's "told truth every step of way";
• and the repeated misreports by the New York Times (which they still stand behind despite all lack of evidence) and the many other mainstream outlets who were similarly hoodwinked into reporting the same phony story.

Greg Brock, the New York Times Senior Editor for Standards, as we documented exclusively some weeks ago, is even on email record as citing that Fox "News" appearance by O'Keefe (embedded again at right) as his only evidence to "stand by our reporting" in which the "paper of record" has, time and again, misreprested O'Keefe as having "visited Acorn offices ... dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risque high school play."

Just two days after the Times described the "outlandish" dress of O'Keefe, the Congress of the United States passed legislation to remove federal funding for ACORN. (A federal judge later found the legislation to be "unconstitutional".)...

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...

Authorities indicate the pilot who crashed his plane into the building housing the IRS offices in Austin, TX, this afternoon did so deliberately. He also set his house on fire. So far, just one person is confirmed dead, other than the pilot, Joseph Stack.

Stack left behind an anti-tax, anti-government, anti-corporate, anti-Catholic "manifesto" suicide note (posted in full below), which concludes "Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."

UPDATE 4:06pm PT: Say what? McClatchy reports that WH Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters the incident does not appear to be terrorism. Huh? Are you kidding? Would it be terrorism if the pilot's name had been Abdullah instead of Stack? Wouldn't Fox "News" be going wall-to-wall with coverage at this point if that had been the case? Had Gibbs read Stack's note (as posted below), which reads "violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer," before making that assessment? What the hell is he talking about? Or perhaps I should ask, what the hell is "terrorism"? Only the stuff that's done by tan or darker guys with names like Abdullah? Or did McClatchy misreport Gibbs' comments, and he was trying to say it doesn't appear to be Muslim extremist terrorism?!

Stack's complete suicide note follows in full below...