NY Times Killed A Story To Protect Obama

logo by Leon Alberti
article from Powerline Blog.com
May 17, 2009
by John

In today's New York Times, Public Editor Clark Hoyt reveals the result of his investigation into the charge that the paper killed a story during the 2008 Presidential campaign in order to help Barack Obama. Hoyt concludes that the claim is "nonsense."

ON March 17, a Republican lawyer, quoting a confidential source for a Times reporter, testified to Congress that the newspaper killed a story last fall because it would have been "a game-changer" in the presidential election.

The charge, amplified by Bill O'Reilly on Fox News in April and reverberating around the conservative blogosphere, is about the most damning allegation that can be made against a news organization. If true, it would mean that Times editors, whose job is to report the facts without fear or favor, were so lacking in integrity that they withheld an important story in order to influence the election.

But the facts as related by Hoyt don't rebut the charge; they support it.

Times reporter Stephanie Strom was looking into ACORN, and she had a source, a former ACORN employee named Anita Moncrief. Moncrief told Strom that she had evidence of "constant contact" between ACORN's Project Vote and both the Obama and Clinton campaigns:

On Sept. 7, Moncrief wrote to Strom that she had donor lists from the campaigns of Obama and Hillary Clinton and that there had been "constant contact" between the campaigns and Project Vote, an Acorn affiliate whose tax-exempt status forbids it to engage in partisan politics. Moncrief said she had withheld that information earlier but was disclosing it now that the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin was "all over it."

"I am sorry," she wrote, "but I believe in Obama and did not want to help the
Republicans."

A key part of Moncrief's story was that the Obama campaign had furnished ACORN with lists of maxed-out donors so that ACORN could mine them for contributions. In fact, Moncrief provided the Times reporter, Strom, with such a list that ACORN allegedly obtained from the Obama campaign. Hoyt does not dispute that this story, if true, was evidence of violation of the campaign finance laws.

So why did the Times pull the plug on Strom's ongoing investigation? The story became public because a Republican lawyer named Heather Heidelbaugh testified, apparently based on information she got from Anita Moncrief, that the Times had been working on an Obama-ACORN story but that "Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, 'it was a game-changer.'" Hoyt undertakes to show that this charge was false.

He admits, though, that Strom's editor, Suzanne Daley, "called a halt to Strom's pursuit of the Obama angle." So the Times did kill the investigation and any further reporting. The only question is why. Hoyt uncritically accepts Daley's explanation:

"We had worked on that story for a while and had come up empty-handed," Daley said. "You have to cut bait after a while." She said she never thought of the story as a game-changer and never used that term with Strom.

But wait! Hoyt also relates that shortly before Daley pulled the plug, "Moncrief finally agreed to go on the record" and Strom had scheduled a meeting with her. It was when she called Moncrief to cancel the meeting that Strom allegedly told her that her bosses had killed the investigation to protect Obama. Obviously, if Strom was about to hit pay-dirt with an on-the-record witness, Daley's assertion that she killed the story because Strom "had come up empty-handed" is false.

Hoyt doesn't appear to notice the contradiction. He does, however, labor manfully to defend the Times. He goes to great lengths to refute the claim that Strom told Moncrief the Times killed the story because it was a "game-changer," as though that particular phrase had some talismanic significance. Yet, if you read Hoyt's column to the end, you find that in an email to Hoyt Moncrief attributed exactly that statement to Strom:

She said Strom told her "it was their policy not to print a game-changer for either side that close to the election."

Hoyt also argues that the story about Obama and ACORN would not have been a "game-changer" in that it would not have swung the election to John McCain. I agree. But since when is that the standard? Is Hoyt telling us that the Times' policy is only to print stories that have the potential to change the result of a Presidential election? Of course, if the story did have the potential to change the outcome of the election, that, too, would have been offered as a reason not to print it.

Hoyt also volunteers that Moncrief had a "credibility problem" because she had been fired by ACORN for putting private expenses on an ACORN credit card. So she is that classic newspaper source, a disgruntled former employee. Is Hoyt telling us that the Times doesn't run stories on the basis of leads from disgruntled former employees? Hah! If the paper followed that policy, it would lose out on its best exposes. And it bears repeating that Moncrief was attesting to first-hand information, not just passing along a rumor she had heard at ACORN. By her account, "it was her job to identify" maxed-out Obama donors who might contribute to ACORN's Project Vote.

Hoyt interviewed Strom, of course, but--rather remarkably--he does not reveal what Strom told him about her conversation with Daley in which Daley killed Strom's ongoing investigation. That's a rather significant omission, isn't it? Instead, Hoyt merely quotes Strom's observation that she did write a story on ACORN that appeared on October 22:

[B]efore they were to meet, Strom said, another source gave her an internal report detailing concerns about impermissible political activity by Acorn and its tax-exempt affiliates. The resulting article was published on Oct. 22.

That story is here. It addresses another topic entirely, the lack of any real distinction between ACORN and Project Vote. It does, however, address the Obama controversy, very briefly:

Republicans have tried to make an issue of Senator Barack Obama's ties to the group, which he represented in a lawsuit in 1995. The Obama campaign has denied any connection with Acorn's voter registration drives.

There you have it. That's the last word the Times' readers got on Obama's very likely illegal relationship with ACORN.

If the Times didn't kill the story for the reason illogically asserted by Daley--it hadn't panned out--then why did they kill it? Perhaps Stephanie Strom's email reply to Anita Moncrief, quoted by Hoyt, suggests an answer:

Am also onto the Obama connection, sadly. Would love the donor lists. As for helping the Repubs, they're already onto this like white on rice. SIGH!

For the New York Times, Republicans are simply the enemy. By October 2008, it was time to circle the wagons.
Click to read the article and the comments

ObamACORN: Criminal charges filed against ACORN and two employees

image by Leo Alberti

article from American Thinker

by Rick Moran

May 05, 2009

Criminal charges filed against ACORN and two employees

I'm glad somebody, somewhere is finally cracking down on these goons.

The state of Nevada has filed charges against the group ACORN and two of their employees for voter fraud. Mary Manning of the Las Vegas Sun has the details:

The complaint includes 26 counts of voter fraud and 13 counts for compensating those registering voters, both felonies.

The Association of Community Organization for Reform Now, Inc., also known as ACORN, operated a Las Vegas office that helped register low-income voters last year.

Throughout 2008, ACORN employed canvassers to register people to vote in Nevada, the complaint said. ACORN paid the canvassers between $8 and $9 an hour, but made continued employment and continued compensation based on the canvasser registering 20 voters per shift. Those who failed to sign up 20 voters per shift were terminated, the complaint said.

From July 27 through Oct. 2 ACORN also provided additional compensation under a bonus program called "Blackjack" or "21+" that was based on the total number of voters a person registered.

A canvasser who brought in 21 or more completed voter registration forms per shift would be paid a bonus of $5.

The Blackjack program was created by employee Christopher Edwards, field director for the Las Vegas office. ACORN timesheets indicate that corporate officers of ACORN were aware of the Blackjack bonus program and failed to take immediate action to stop it.

Take those 26 counts and multiply by at least 50 and you have a small idea of the kind of registration fraud committed by these goons.

In places like Ohio, it was much worse and charges against several ACORN employees may be filed there as well.

The Nevada ACORN had a convicted felon serving time in a medium security facility as one of their supervisors of the voter registration project.

Looks like he'll have some company shortly.
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Verbal Terrorism by an ACORN mob again

photoshop credit Leo Alberti

This isn't free speech, this is verbal terrorism. I don't have any problem with protesters being their, because that all by itself visually indicates their disagreement with that particular foreclosure process. That's their free speech.

However, they don't have the right to disrupt. That's not free speech.
Rees

Health hazard: ACORN mob strikes
from Michelle Malkin.com
By Michelle Malkin
April 28, 2009 09:05 PM

They’re baaaaack. The housing entitlement mobsters of ACORN menaced a Sacramento foreclosure auction event today — and helped send an auctioneer to the hospital with chest pains. Homeland security alert, Ja-No? Left-wing extremism is on the rise:

A large crowd of protesters disrupted several foreclosure auctions today on the Sacramento County Courthouse steps, winning temporary cancellation of one Sacramento foreclosure and sending an auctioneer to the hospital with chest pains.

Bidders on the homes, all declining to provide their names, called the ACORN protest the first major disruption of an established auction schedule that plays out every weekday at the courthouse following 37,000 foreclosures in the capital region since Jan. 2007…

..As the first auction was to begin at 9:30 a.m. on the Sacramento County Courthouse steps, Los Angeles ACORN member Kathleen Thompson-Boons asked an unidentified auctioneer with LPS Financial Services of Sacramento “to stop the auction.”

When the auctioneer resumed seeking bids from nine potential bidders, Thompson-Boons asked again, prompting the auctioneer to say, “If you’re not going to bid, then go away.”

Seconds later, protesters surrounded the group, chanting, blowing whistles and creating a commotion that made it impossible to hear. The auctioneer, who had a pacemaker according to associates, began to collapse and was later taken to a local hospital.

The protest continued for about 90 minutes. ACORN members left after cheering a concession by LPS Financial Services to cancel a specific requested foreclosure auction for one Sacramento family. Minutes later, as the group left, the auctions resumed as scheduled.

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Obama: Give me ideas on tightening federal belt

Hey Obama - how about getting rid of Acorn which is nothing more than another wing of the Democratic party. That's at least a beginning.
Rees

from Yahoo News
By PHILIP ELLIOTT
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Think you can do better than your federal boss? President Barack Obama wants to know how.

Obama on Saturday announced a plan for federal workers to propose ways to improve their agencies' and departments' budgets. The president said employees' ideas would be key as his Cabinet officials try to cut millions from the budget and trim the deficit.

"After all, Americans across the country know that the best ideas often come from workers, not just management," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address. "That's why we'll establish a process through which every government worker can submit their ideas for how their agency can save money and perform better. We'll put the suggestions that work into practice."

Obama's pitch comes at the end of a week focused on federal spending. On Friday, Democrats in Congress neared a deal on Obama's budget proposal and inched closer to passing a bill that would result in some $500 billion in deficits.

To confront that perception, Obama earlier in the week ordered officials to identify $100 million in savings to achieve over time — a relative pittance against the broader plan, his aides later acknowledged.

"Earlier this week, I held my first Cabinet meeting and sent a clear message: cut what doesn't work. Already, we've identified substantial savings," Obama said. "And in the days and weeks ahead, we will continue going through the budget line by line, and we'll identify more than 100 programs that will be cut or eliminated."

Obama said his administration would make $2 trillion in deficit reductions in the next decade, a pledge he has made repeatedly during his first three months in office. He also said he wants to re-evaluate priorities in the capital and urged Congress to pass legislation that would force lawmakers to pay for new policies and avoid large deficits. He also told agencies they could keep a part of the money they save. [Why would he say something stupid like that? - my comment]

"So much of our government was built to deal with different challenges from a different era," said Obama, noting that he took office facing a $1.3 billion budget deficit.

"Too often, the result is wasteful spending, bloated programs and inefficient results."
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Why isn’t the F-22 Raptor part of a stimulus?

from Hot Air.com
April 13, 2009
by Ed Morrissey

The Obama administration has put together both a $700 billion stimulus package and a $3.5 trillion budget for the coming year, claiming that government spending will restart the flopping economy. Obama wanted to focus on “shovel-ready” projects to get ditch-digging started as soon as possible. However, the Pentagon tubed a program that not only had people already employed but also produced the kind of fighters that keeps America dominant in the skies. Hugh Hewitt wonders in today’s Washington Examiner why this shovel-ready project got buried:

The planes cost less than $150 million each to build. We can get 100 more F-22s for $15 billion. Given that our six-month deficit for the fiscal year under way is already scraping $1 trillion, what’s $15 billion for an extended run of unchallenged air superiority against existing and –crucially—unknown threats?

Did I mention that the F-22 is shovel ready? Remember all those jobs President Obama wanted to “create or save”? Evidently there is a category of jobs he doesn’t count among those worthy of retention –those on the national security shift.

Even if the Raptor wasn’t a guarantor of margins of safety for every American soldier, sailor or Marine operating below its shield, even then you’d have to conclude that the shuttering of its production line in an era of giant job losses was indicative of a remarkable, deeply ideological hostility towards defense spending.

The second coming of the Carter Administration is upon us, heralded by this almost wanton sluffing away of a weapon of unmatched capabilities and the simultaneous paring of missile defense appropriations.

The Carter reference, in this case, relates to Jimmy Carter’s cancellation of the B-1 bomber program shortly after taking office. I recall this quite clearly, as the Admiral Emeritus worked for Rockwell International, the prime contractor for the B-1, and would have lost his job had he transferred to that program as he had been planning. Carter decided to cancel the B-1 to focus on the new work being done in stealth technology, but Ronald Reagan reinstated it, convinced that America could walk and chew gum at the same time.

This seems like a similar circumstance. The question for the Pentagon appears to have been whether to buy more Raptors or wait for the F-35 Lightning II deliveries in a couple of years. The correct answer would have been to do both; buy more Raptors and keep 95,000 people employed, while waiting for the Lightning IIs.

Would it cost more money? Of course, but let’s put that in perspective. Fifteen billion dollars amounts to a whopping 2% of the total price tag for Porkulus. Unlike at least half of Porkulus’ spending, it would actually provide immediate work, saving existing American jobs. Not just any jobs, mind you, but hard-core, high-paying manufacturing jobs, the kind that politicians like Barack Obama laments when they disappear. I’d guess that many of them are union jobs, too.

Unlike most of the supposedly shovel-ready projects in Porkulus, this delivers a usable, valuable product that serves the government’s legitimate purpose of national defense. It doesn’t feed the pork-barrel demands of Congress, and most importantly, it’s a proven military system.

I wrote in February that the Raptor was a no-brainer for a government looking to provide economic stimulus. I got the “no brain” part right.
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Man admits voting for Obama in late wife's name

Like they say in Chicago: Vote early and often! I'll bet that his wife's ballot wasn't the only ballot of a deceased person that was cast for Obama.
Rees

from Breitbart.com
by RYAN J. FOLEY
Associated Press Writer

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A Wisconsin man has acknowledged that he illegally cast an absentee ballot for Barack Obama in his wife's name to fulfill her dying wish.

Stephen Wroblewski (roe-BLESS-key) of Milwaukee said Wednesday he plans to plead guilty to voter fraud to end the embarrassing episode.

He says he contacted prosecutors the day after the fall election after learning that the ballot he cast for his wife was being challenged.

His wife, Jacqueline Wroblewski, was a veteran Democratic activist who died of lung cancer in August.

Wroblewski says his wife would have been appalled at what he did because she "was a stickler for the rules."
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ACORN and the Huffington Post to disrupt Tea Parties?

Tea Party role reversal: how to deal with potential agents provocateurs from the left

April 7th, 2009 11:12 pm
by Roger L. Simon
from Pajamas Media

Back when I was semi-card-carrying leftie, we used to spend a lot of time speculating who was the agent provocateur - read: FBI agent - at the demonstration. Usually we thought he was the most extreme character, the guy most obviously shredding his draft card in full view of the media while tossing a cherry bomb at an American flag already heavily doused in kerosene, maybe adding a little defecation into the mix. The theory was the more “out there” the acts, the more likely the motive was to discredit our “righteous” cause. This often included yet more extreme provocateurs inside the more violent groups like the Panthers and the Weathermen where real bombs, not the cherry sort, were involved.

But times have changed and for once the formerly quiescent right is gearing up to demonstrate on April 15. The left has not had to deal with something like this in recent years. Fuddy-duddy as they and their ideology may be, they have had the demo scene pretty much to themselves for decades. An element of distress (envy? nerves?) is in the air. According to Newsbusters derived from the Cavuto Show and other sources, in a startling role reversal, ACORN and the Huffington Post are planning to infiltrate the Tea Parties.

On Fox News Channel’s April 7 “Your World,” host Neil Cavuto reported that the Tax Day tea party protests on April 15 will be “infiltrated” by their political opponents and led by left-wing activist organizations. He specifically named Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

“Only eight days before a nationwide tea party, some over-caffeinated crashers aiming to lay waste to it,” Cavuto said. “Reports of very well-organized infiltrators trying to mix in and rain on this parade. Talk about taxing.”

Of course, in the parlance of a more centrist liberal, this all depends on what your definition of infiltrate is. The HuffPo is planning, like PJTV and Pajamas Media, to send citizen reporters. If that’s true, more power to them. Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, I always say. But if they intend to participate and shape events while hiding their identities, well, that’s another matter. The same is true of ACORN. I would say to them welcome. Demonstrate, counter demonstrate, do your thing. This is America. But if someone’s out to play the agents provocateurs game, trying to make the Tea Party movement seem to be what it’s not, painting libertarians as racists or similar nonsense, well, that deserves to be exposed and countered vigorously.

So my recommendation to Tea Party demonstrators as a former leftie is to tear a leaf from my old book. Keep your eye out for the most extreme characters and then ask yourself: Is that real? Is that person who he or she says he is? Cui bono, who profits, here from what they are saying or doing? Draw your conclusions (carefully!) and then act accordingly and completely within the law.

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Obama and Gates Gut the Military - ACORN Yes! - F-22's No!

ACORN is an unconstitutional, federally funded arm of the Democratic Party. ACORN enables fraudulent registration and they directly campaign for the Democratic party.

Obama wants to stop building F-22's and also cut critical Missile Defense Systems. And to think they propose these type of cuts right after North Korea launched their ICBM that has a potential range of Hawaii and Alaska. Great decision Obama! Increase the budget for ACORN and decrease critical defense programs.
Rees

The secretary's new budget will leave us weaker to pay for the president's domestic programs.

from The Wall Street Journal
By THOMAS DONNELLY and GARY SCHMITT
April 8, 2009

On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a significant reordering of U.S. defense programs. His recommendations should not go unchallenged.

In the 1990s, defense cuts helped pay for increased domestic spending, and that is true today. Though Mr. Gates said that his decisions were "almost exclusively influenced by factors other than simply finding a way to balance the books," the broad list of program reductions and terminations suggest otherwise. In fact, he tacitly acknowledged as much by saying the budget plan represented "one of those rare chances to match virtue to necessity" -- the "necessity" of course being the administration's decision to reorder the government's spending priorities.

However, warfare is not a human activity that directly awards virtue. Nor is it a perfectly calculable endeavor that permits a delicate "balancing" of risk. More often it rewards those who arrive on the battlefield "the fustest with the mostest," as Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once put it. If Mr. Gates has his way, U.S. forces will find it increasingly hard to meet the Forrest standard. Consider a few of the details of the Gates proposals:

- The termination of the F-22 Raptor program at just 187 aircraft inevitably will call U.S. air supremacy -- the salient feature, since World War II, of the American way of war -- into question. [Hey Obama - this decision will eliminate 98,00 jobs - my comment]

The need for these sophisticated, stealthy, radar-evading planes is already apparent. During Russia's invasion of Georgia, U.S. commanders wanted to fly unmanned surveillance aircraft over the region, and requested that F-22s sanitize the skies so that the slow-moving drones would be protected from Russian fighters or air defenses. When the F-22s were not made available, likely for fear of provoking Moscow, the reconnaissance flights were cancelled.

As the air-defense and air-combat capabilities of other nations, most notably China, increase, the demand for F-22s would likewise rise. And the Air Force will have to manage this small fleet of Raptors over 30 years. Compare that number with the 660 F-15s flying today, but which are literally falling apart at the seams from age and use. The F-22 is not merely a replacement for the F-15; it also performs the functions of electronic warfare and other support aircraft. Meanwhile, Mr. Gates is further postponing the already decades-long search for a replacement for the existing handful of B-2 bombers.

- The U.S. Navy will continue to shrink below the fleet size of 313 ships it set only a few years ago. Although Mr. Gates has rightly decided to end the massive and expensive DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer program, there will be additional reductions to the surface fleet. The number of aircraft carriers will drop eventually to 10. The next generation of cruisers will be delayed, and support-ship projects stretched out. Older Arleigh Burke destroyers will be upgraded and modernized, but at less-than-needed rates.

The good news is that Mr. Gates will not to reduce the purchases of the Littoral Combat Ship, which can be configured for missions from antipiracy to antisubmarine warfare. But neither will he buy more than the 55 planned for by the previous Bush administration. And the size and structure of the submarine fleet was studiously not mentioned. The Navy's plan to begin at last to procure two attack submarines per year -- absolutely vital considering the pace at which China is deploying new, quieter subs -- is uncertain, at best.

- Mr. Gates has promised to "restructure" the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, arguing that the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan have called into question the need for new ground combat vehicles. The secretary noted that the Army's modernization plan does not take into account the $25 billion investment in the giant Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles. But it's hard to think of a more specialized and less versatile vehicle.

The MRAP was ideal for dealing with the proliferation of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Iraq. But the FCS vehicle -- with a lightweight yet better-protected chassis, greater fuel efficiency and superior off-road capacity -- is far more flexible and useful for irregular warfare. Further, the ability to form battlefield "networks" will make FCS units more effective than the sum of their individual parts. Delaying modernization means that future generations of soldiers will conduct mounted operations in the M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles designed in the 1970s. Finally, Mr. Gates capped the size of the U.S. ground force, ignoring all evidence that it is too small to handle current and future major contingencies.

- The proposed cuts in space and missile defense programs reflect a retreat in emerging environments that are increasingly critical in modern warfare. The termination of the Airborne Laser and Transformational Satellite programs is especially discouraging.

The Airborne Laser is the most promising form of defense against ballistic missiles in the "boost phase," the moments immediately after launch when the missiles are most vulnerable. This project was also the military's first operational foray into directed energy, which will be as revolutionary in the future as "stealth" technology has been in recent decades. The Transformational Satellite program employs laser technology for communications purposes, providing not only enhanced bandwidth -- essential to fulfill the value of all kinds of information networks -- but increased security.

Mr. Gates justifies these cuts as a matter of "hard choices" and "budget discipline," saying that "[E]very defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk . . . is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in." But this calculus is true only because the Obama administration has chosen to cut defense, while increasing domestic entitlements and debt so dramatically.

The budget cuts Mr. Gates is recommending are not a temporary measure to get us over a fiscal bump in the road. Rather, they are the opening bid in what, if the Obama administration has its way, will be a future U.S. military that is smaller and packs less wallop. But what is true for the wars we're in -- that numbers matter -- is also true for the wars that we aren't yet in, or that we simply wish to deter.

Mr. Donnelly is a resident fellow and Mr. Schmitt is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They are co-editors of "Of Men and Materiel: the Crisis in Military Resources" (AEI, 2007).
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Obama and Acorn story was killed by NY Times

“It was a game changer”

Thus was the reason, according to former ACORN worker, Anita Moncrief, why the New York Times killed a story about the connections between the activist group and the Obama campaign.

from Q and O

March 30, 2009

by Michael W.

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”
[...]

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the [Obama] campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”’

ACORN does not exactly deny Moncrief’s allegations, but instead waives her off as a “disgruntled” employee:

“None of this wild and varied list of charges has any credibility and we’re not going to spend our time on it,” said Kevin Whelan, ACORN deputy political director in a statement issued last week.

And the NYT isn’t saying much either:

Ms. Mathis [the New York Times’ Senior Vice President for Corporate Communications] wrote,

“In response to your questions to our reporter, Stephanie Strom, we do not discuss our newsgathering and won’t comment except to say that political considerations played no role in our decisions about how to cover this story or any other story about President Obama.”

Strangely, neither the Obama administration nor anyone connected with his campaign comments on the story. Of course, if the allegations regarding handing over the donor list are true, then there may campaign finance law violations to worry about, so they probably wouldn’t say much anyway.

I have to admit, this is almost a dog-bites-man story. There can’t be too many people who will seriously contend that the NYT isn’t a liberal newspaper. And it wasn’t any big secret during the run-up to the election that the MSM was in the tank for Obama. But I do wonder if many people realize the lengths that the MSM would go to in order to see their boy to the finish line. Hillary supporters got the message pretty loud and clear during the primaries, and Palin’s backers can cite chapter and verse on how the MSM dragged her and her family through the gutter. Some people might even remember that story suggesting that McCain had an affair with lobbyist Vicki L. Iseman (for which she sued the NYT and settled out of court).

Yet, how many people realize that the de facto leader of the MSM would spike a story that’s not just critical of their chosen candidate, but that implicates him in illegal activity with a notorious election law violator? Seems like that would be news fit to print. Just not in the NYT apparently.

By the way, keep this story in mind as plans continue to unfold regarding the federal government subsidizing newspapers. If the NYT was willing to spike a story just to help its chosen one, what will they do when that chosen one is paying the bills?
Tags: ACORN, Anita Moncrief, Election 2008, Obama campaign

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Pigs Fly and...

Man bites dog: Conyers troubled by ACORN allegations, calls for probe

posted at 5:13 pm

on March 20, 2009

by Allahpundit

from Hot Air.com

Turns out they might be kind of shady. Who knew?

Mr. Conyers, Michigan Democrat and fierce partisan, suggested a
congressional probe after scathing testimony about the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) during a hearing on various voting issues
related to the 2008 presidential election.

Mr. Conyers called the accusations “a pretty serious matter.”

“I think that it would be something that would be worth our time,” he
said during Thursday’s hearing. “We’ve never had one person representing ACORN
before the committee. … I think in all fairness we ought to really examine
it.”

The testimony by Pittsburgh lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh accused the
nonprofit group of violating tax, campaign-finance and other laws by, among
other things, sharing with the Barack Obama campaign a list of the Democrat’s
maxed-out campaign donors so ACORN could use it to solicit them for a
get-out-the-vote drive.

Follow the link for details on an exciting new program known as “muscle for the money,” in which communities “organize” in front of protest targets until they’re paid to go away, and the inevitable Democratic pushback against Conyers’s surprising call for an investigation. Exit question: ACORN and Team Barry exchanging donor information? I’m shocked, shocked.

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