BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY A word of warning: The story you are about to read is neither fair nor balanced; just true. The other night I snuck into the Tea Party, like a spy in the House of Glenn Beck Love, and nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. You know about the Tea Party movement, right? The populist jihad—sponsored by Fox News, FreedomWorks, the Taliban wing of the Republican Party and the rest of the Dick Armey—that’s putting the RIOT back in PATRIOT. They’re white as hell and they’re not gonna take the 2008 presidential election anymore. […]
TOUGH NUT TO CRACK: Harshbarger Report Clears ACORN Of Illegality In ‘Pimp & Hooker’ Gotcha Videos
SEIU: Today, former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger released his report on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN) following an independent and aggressive review of the organization. Mr. Harshbarger deserves thanks for not only having the ability to see past the sensationalized headlines, but for recognizing and reporting on the steps that ACORN had already taken to address management weaknesses it had identified earlier. It is striking that despite the news coverage, Mr. Harshbarger found no pattern of illegal conduct by the staff of ACORN targeted in the ‘sting’ operation, even in cases that looked clear cut from […]
PW: Why The Right Hates ACORN, How They Took Them Down, And Why Philly Didn’t Take The Bait
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY There’s an old joke that goes like this: A pimp and a prostitute walk into an ACORN office and ask for advice setting up a brothel and smuggling in underage Salvadoran girls to whore out for fun and profit. The punchline is the pimp and the prostitute were in fact a pair of twentysomething right-wing media provocateurs armed with a hidden camera. Over the summer James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles visited an undisclosed number of ACORN offices on the East and West coasts—including Philadelphia. While the Philly office didn’t […]
HEIL HANNITY: Fox News Pitbull Tied To Neo-Nazis
HUFFINGTON POST: The folks over at NewsHounds have been watching their Fox News Channel quarry dither over Senator Barack Obama’s associations with pastor Jeremiah Wright, and noted Fox’s own Sean Hannity getting himself tripped up in the guilt-by-association tango. Seems that one of Hannity’s close chums is a neo-Nazi named Hal Turner who used to be a radio host, is apparently the top man in Bergen, NJ white-supremacist circles, and probably spends a lot of his time in his basement with Star Wars action figures acting out Holocaust-denier versions of The Return of the Jedi. In short, just the sort […]