Sunday, September 20, 2009

The Legal Implications of ACORN’s Scandal

Employees from ACORN allegedly advised people posing as prostitutes and pimps how to cheat on taxes.

by Errol Louis – New York Daily News

Employees from ACORN allegedly advised people posing as prostitutes and pimps how to cheat on taxes.

 

The videos shot and distributed by a pair of right-wing pranksters to discredit ACORNhad all the elements of a good political hit job: sleaze, sensationalism, sleight-of-hand.

James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles went from one ACORN community office to another posing as a pimp and his whore, pretending to seek help securing low-income housing and/or tax help to set up a brothel using underage illegal immigrants.

Not one ACORN outlet actually completed or filed illegal paperwork, but the video stunt worked like a charm anyway.

A few ACORN workers - out of a staff of 600 - gave the undercover filmmakers advice about ways to further their lurid prostitution scheme.

That is all it took. A full-scale witch hunt is underway against ACORN - and that means normal standards of proof, evidence and rationality get tossed out the window.

Biased and/or naive news producers and editors rushed one-minute excerpts of O'Keefe and Giles' heavily edited videos onto national television without a thought, even when the pair refused to release the full tapes or answer questions on the air about how they were created.

Click to read.

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