There is no question that Planned Parenthood has been in the bullseye for years from the zealots and anti-abortion activists. They [...]]]> Washington There is no such thing as total protection from the “politics of gotcha” in the modern environment of polarized politics.

There is no question that Planned Parenthood has been in the bullseye for years from the zealots and anti-abortion activists. They had endured stings in the past, and knew in the wake of the the ACORN pimp-prostitute stings that they needed to be ready for James O’Keefe or his copycats.

And from what I know they were ready and on the ball. From the first visits they seem to have been monitoring the stingers and sending out red alerts to all of their affiliates to be ready for such subterfuge. Now from published reports they seem to have known that a dozen of their offices were hit with the similar tales of a pimp looking for medical help for underage prostitutes. Planned Parenthood reported the incidents in each case to federal and appropriate authorities. I’m not clear that any law was broken in such situations so the reports mainly provide relief for the organization if and when the whole sting becomes public.

Nonetheless the stingers, who were actors with something called “Live Action,” still managed to get some video of an office manager being way too helpful to these fools. Kaboom, it’s on the air. Slam, she’s fired and looking for advice on the unemployment line. Following the script, the stingers claim they have more to come signaling their hopes of creating a pattern of disclosures that were so devastating and unbalancing for ACORN when they were brought down this way.

I would think that Planned Parenthood did everything “right” organizationally. Unfortunately, like any large organization with a wide operations in the field, no policy will ever be perfectly followed, people are always going to be inappropriately helpful in human encounters, and finally, nobody and nothing is perfect, sad to say.

Nor does it seem to matter to the zealots. It is as irrelevant here as it was in the ACORN situation that there was no real illegality or institutional deceit. The aim is to create optics. The reality is secondary if not irrelevant.

And following the ACORN-sting play book, the hope here is to be able to stampede the herd in Congress to cut off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Despite the facts again that such funding is not used for abortion, the zealots want to drive every dollar away and scare donors, which worked superbly in the ACORN sting. It didn’t matter if ACORN wasn’t getting any federal money, the Issa list of 300 odd corporations connected to the ACORN family was (and is) still being used as a excuse to not fund and deny contracts to unrelated entities in fear of the new McCarthyism in the land.

Sad state of affairs. Ironically, the very shadow of the ACORN sting may be what saves Planned Parenthood and other future targets of such stings. The delayed reaction that not only was ACORN burned but so was a sleepy press and an unsuspecting public has made people and politicians slightly more skeptical of the zealots gotcha games. O’Keefe’s exploits have besmirched such tactics whether with ACORN or the head scratching weirdness with Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. The stingers are even forced to claim they have disassociated themselves with the prototype models for their own tactics.

We can only hope that despite these kinds of efforts and the cowardice of the press and politicians in dealing with them so often, the fact that you can fool some of the people some of the time, still does not mean that you can fool the same people all of the time.

]]> http://chieforganizer.org/2011/02/03/planned-parenthood-sting/feed/ 1 http://chieforganizer.org/2011/01/15/george-clooney-mccarthy-and-commie-terrorists/ http://chieforganizer.org/2011/01/15/george-clooney-mccarthy-and-commie-terrorists/#comments Sat, 15 Jan 2011 17:48:29 +0000 jstuart http://chieforganizer.org/?p=4249 New Orleans In these politically cold, hard, and unsettled times, I took advantage of my new love affair with my library card to try and gain some perspective, maybe even insights, into the McCarthy Era that ravished the American politics, liberals, and the left in the 1950’s by ordering up “Good Night and Good Luck” [...]]]> New Orleans In these politically cold, hard, and unsettled times, I took advantage of my new love affair with my library card to try and gain some perspective, maybe even insights, into the McCarthy Era that ravished the American politics, liberals, and the left in the 1950’s by ordering up “Good Night and Good Luck” a story of Edward R. Murrow, the celebrated media commentator, directed by huge movie star hunk, George Clooney in 2005.  I had missed the movie at the theaters, and was surprised at how well done it was, regardless of how many parts fact or fiction, since it is still a movie after all, not a documentary.

There were a lot of recognizable faces besides Clooney including Robert Downey, who always adds something to the mix.  Murrow was played by David Strathairn, who was ahead of me at Williams as I was passing through, and Patricia Clarkson from New Orleans the daughter of one of our Councilwomen.

In the early days of television when news still mattered and commanded an audience, those were different times and Murrow had come to the screen with his name and legacy already writ large from his wartime radio broadcasts.  The movie dates the turnaround, perhaps more symbolically than factually, with a down-the-line Air Force civilian employee in Michigan being pushed out of his job because of a sealed envelope filled with unknown evidence and charges, but provoking enough fear of red Commie taint.  Murrow, as this story goes, picked the piece up out of the back pages of a paper and highlighted the story provoking Senator McCarthy’s attack at him personally.  Now the attacks are shotgun blasts at the high and mighty as well as virtually anyone committed to working for change.

McCarthy in footage from the time accuses Murrow of having been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical, syndicalist union, broken by the Espionage Act in WWI.  Other vintage footage includes McCarthy’s repeated assertions that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was included on numerous official lists of “subversive” organizations serving as fronts for the Communist Party.  None of which was true and all of which were denied.   A low level African-American civilian employee is wildly accused of having infiltrated the “code” room despite her denials of ever having been there or done anything but transmit messages as directed without any knowledge of their contents.

Sobering and depressing stuff that made for a great movie, but a miserable look at life in our country.  This week I read a right wing blog that listed me as the “founder of ACORN” and then added gratuitously, “America’s largest terrorist organization.”  Clearly just a blogger, not a US Senator, so proof, presumably not needed, assertion uncontested, another dangerous voice in the thundering herd, hopefully unheard and ignored.  Watching McCarthy smear with the IWW brush, I thought of the poor guy who was an Obama nominee for the federal court and throughout the summer had to defend the fact that 30+ years before he had been a door-to-door fundraising canvasser for a couple of months for ACORN, and now decades later teetered for months on the edge of the knife.  It goes on and on in the right wing witch hunts of bloggers, Beck, and others woven of whole cloth.

A poll in the New York Times, says only about a 30% surveyed believed that wild talk and hate speech contributed to the recent killings in Tucson, and that’s a good thing.  On the other hand the cumulative results of all of these allegations, accusations, ad infinitum, ad nauseum is guaranteed to chill action for change, participation of citizens, and our very democracy, while leaving many afraid of associations and support in fearful isolation.

None of which stops people like me from doing the work, but all of which categorically makes it harder to the do work and to work at the largest scale possible and necessary.

Watching the movie, it was hard not to be reminded that there are now dozens and dozens of McCarthy-wannabes, but very, very few Edward R. Murrow’s.  George Clooney could make another, more contemporary movie in America now.  The problem is that he probably can’t find enough effective heroes today, and with the new wave of Congressional investigations promised and coming, few lessons seem to have been learned from the McCarthy moments more than 50 years ago.

Witch hunt

New Orleans If, as it seems increasingly likely, the Republicans take over the House of Representatives in the coming week, it is not too early to prepare for the coming contentiousness and partisan, political baiting that will accompany the new McCarthyism in the House Investigations Committee when Congressman Darryl Issa (R-CA) takes [...]]]>

Witch hunt

New Orleans If, as it seems increasingly likely, the Republicans take over the House of Representatives in the coming week, it is not too early to prepare for the coming contentiousness and partisan, political baiting that will accompany the new McCarthyism in the House Investigations Committee when Congressman Darryl Issa (R-CA) takes over next year.  Be prepared for the Washington equivalent of the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy commie witch hunts.  I know I’m already talking to lawyers about strategy and advice, because I’ve read enough of Issa’s so-called investigations he released as minority reports over the last several years, to understand fully that these “investigations” are simply long press releases whose dearth of any factual basis makes them read like the bad fictions that they are.

One report built a castle in the air from the firm foundation that ACORN was a tax-exempt, 501c3 organization and therefore had violated a host of rules and regulations about filings and formalities deserving of total scorn, condemnation, and confiscation.  Of course ACORN was never a tax exempt, 501c3, yet that simple piece of research seems to have totally eluded the Issa and his so-called investigators in their rush to burn and torture the organization.

Another report that still sends shivers in the wake of many big and upstanding organizations seemed mainly focused on the fact that the legal department contracted with ACORN did the corporate filings out of the headquarters address of the corporation in New Orleans.  I’ve even been told by major unions with hundreds of thousands of members that they were uncomfortable doing business with any of the 300 odd corporations that Issa had listed in the report in a classic example of “guilt by association.”  For the life of me I’m uncertain where the “guilt” might have been regardless of the “association.”  What large enterprise doesn’t separately incorporate property holdings to segregate liabilities?  What housing operation doesn’t separately incorporate its various housing development properties and projects?  And, these were the bulk of the corporations and the filings, not that the facts would have mattered to Issa and the conspiracy theorists he employed as “investigators.”  If there were justice, once anointed he could start with Citi or Bank of America and sort through their thousands of corporate entities first, which might keep him busy for years as he looks for “criminal conspiracies.”

Given that so much of the hard core Republican base still believes that ACORN “stole” the election for Obama in 2008, maybe this will be his media strategy for an early headline ramp-up as he takes full command of the House Investigations Committee.  After all the Issa motto seems to be:  if we want to say it, it must be true, so who needs the facts anyway?

Have motto, then the sloppy methodology must follow.  How much of what is left of the progressive movement will he try to silence and chill with such antics?

People get ready!