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Posts Tagged ‘Mary Landrieu’

Vindication: Felony Charges Against ACORN-killer James O’Keefe Dropped by Feds

Friday, March 26th, 2010

James O'Keefe, seen here with Hannah Giles, Became Famous by Exposing ACORN's Horrible Business Practices and Today Gained Vindication as All Felony Charges against him were dropped regarding his silly attempt to gain access to Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) office to prove she was ignoring constituent phone calls regarding Obamacare

In a quiet filing late on a Friday afternoon, federal prosecutors dropped all felony charges against James O’Keefe and several other conservative activists who were charged originally with felonies for their silly attempt to prove that the Louisiana office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) was not answering the phone calls of their constituents:

Federal prosecutors filed reduced charges Friday against conservative activist James O’Keefe and three others who were accused of trying to tamper with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office.

The new charges are contained in a bill of information, which can only be filed with a defendant’s consent and typically signals a plea deal. The new filing charges videographer the four with entering a federal building under false pretenses, a misdemeanor. They had been arrested Jan. 25 on felony charges.

O’Keefe, a videographer famous for wearing a pimp costume in a stunt that embarrassed the ACORN community organizing group, has said the group was trying to investigate complaints that constituents calling Landrieu’s office couldn’t get through to criticize her support of a health care reform bill.

J. Garrison Jordan, a lawyer for another defendant, Robert Flanagan, said his client has “an agreement worked out with the government” but wouldn’t elaborate or confirm that the others also have reached a deal with prosecutors.

“I think it’s a fair resolution to the charges, and I’m happy with the agreement we’ve worked out,” he said.

The establishment media, led by NBC and its daytime host David Shuster, falsely claimed O’Keefe was engaged in a Watergate-style operation after his arrest:

All four men were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

It sounded like a Watergate-style operation, but federal officials have not yet said why the men wanted to interfere with Landrieu’s phones, whether they were successful, or even if the goal was political espionage.

O’Keefe himself at the time had this to say:

O’Keefe said, “The truth shall set me free,” as he left a suburban jail Tuesday with Basel and suspect Stan Dai, both 24. All declined to comment. “There will be a time for that,” Dai said.

Some particularly idiotic radical leftist commentary after the January 2010 O’Keefe arrest came from Michael Wolff, speaking darkly of “aggressive prosecutors” taking down Glenn Beck for his claimed sponsoring of the allegedly heinous crimes of O’Keefe:

There are the perpetrators, the four young men who attempted to get access to the telephone system of Mary Landrieu, the Democratic senator from Louisiana. Then there is whomever else can be connected to them, by cell phone records, text messages, or email.

These are the little fish. Somewhere, at some remove, with some level of foreknowledge—with enough deniability or not—are the big fish.

The Times’ front page piece yesterday, with the thumbnails of the four perps, says little—save that O’Keefe and company were right-wing hot dogs—but is full of anticipation. The Times knows well enough that a break-in, one full of theatrical verve, is unlikely to have happened in a vacuum. Indeed, the subtext of the Times piece is all about James O’Keefe’s impressive conservative network.

It’s a network full of high-profile mentors. After O’Keefe’s audacious bit of political theater exposing the haplessness or recklessness of some functionaries at the liberal group, Acorn—a popular bête noire among conservatives—he was immediately and enthusiastically taken up by the right-wing media.

The right-wing media is an insular but curiously convivial group. It loves its fellow travelers. It loves other right-leaning attention seekers. This is a club for the ideologically pure who are media savvy. The Times piece sketches out some of these connections, including O’Keefe’s relationship with Andrew Breitbart, who is in turn connected to Matt Drudge.

The Times does not explicitly draw in Glenn Beck, but the Fox host has done as much as anyone to promote O’Keefe as an example of right-wing talent and personality. The day after the bust, Beck was hurriedly trying to disassociate himself.

Depending on the aggressiveness of the prosecutors involved, we will find out who O’Keefe and company were speaking to. We will find out who was urging O’Keefe on, who O’Keefe was bragging to, and how far up the media chain this really goes.

Obviously, leftwing hacks like NBC, Schuster, Michael Wolff and the NYT were completely wrong on this story.

All told, the massive establishment media focus on this case, and the ridiculous media claims that O’Keefe should be jailed for a decade and that his actions were comparable to Watergate, have been proven false. It appears that O’Keefe and the others involved will now plead guilty to a misdemeanour charge of entering a federal building under false pretenses. This plea deal is appropriate, as O’Keefe and the others were doing exactly that by pretending to be telephone company workers in furtherance of their silly scheme to prove Landrieu was intentionally ignoring constituent phone calls over Obamacare.

UPDATE: Hotair points out more of the prior false MSNBC reporting on O’Keefe, now fully debunked today:

Commenters are wondering in the Headlines thread when Edward R. Murrow’s rightful heir will apologize for calling this a new Watergate or ace reporter David Shuster will walk back his tweets to O’Keefe right after the story first broke in January that “a) you are not a journalist b) the truth is you intended to tap her phones c) it’s a felony d) you will go to prison.” (0 for 4!) Answer: Shuster already did, sort of, but I wouldn’t look for any more remorse than that from MSNBC. The new storyline, guaranteed, will be that O’Keefe got a break because one of the kids in his crew is the son of the acting U.S. Attorney for Western Louisiana. Never mind that there have already been recusals in the case to avoid any conflict of interest; the “corrupt wingnut” narrative shall not be denied. Long live “Watergate Jr.”!

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Dems Complete Nullification of Scott Brown’s Election Via “Unprecedented” Reconciliation Switch

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Senator Scott Brown (D-MA), who won a special election in late January 2010 on a platform of opposing Obamacare in the most liberal state in America, has seen his election nullified by Senate Democrats by the midstream switch to reconciliation

By a vote of 56-43, with three Democrats, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Sen. Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu (D-LA), joined by all 41 Republicans, failing to put the breaks on a large package of changes to the existing law known as Obamacare.   Every vote taken on Obamacare in the past few weeks has had the same character: bipartisan opposition failing to stop the remaining majority of Democrats from passing the legislation – hardly what the average American would expect on the signature legislation of President Obama, as the media-created Obama Brand is one of a “bipartisan” “pragmatic” “centrist” leader.   Indeed, the only thing bipartisan about the legislation is the opposition to it from centrist Democrats and the entire Republican Party.

Obama and the Democrats had tried to avoid making any changes to the House reconciliation package, but the Senate Parliamentarian ruled some parts of it out of order under reconciliation rules, forcing the Senate Democrats to make some changes and  sending the entire reconciliation Obamacare package back to the House for a final, final vote tonight.   The Dems and GOP House members are going back and forth with short speeches in the House now.

It looks like the House will vote shortly to bring the Obamacare legislating to a close:

The Senate approved a package of fixes to the health care reform law Thursday, drawing to a close the chamber’s year-long effort to overhaul the nation’s insurance system.

But the work isn’t done quite yet.

The bill passed 56 to 43, with Vice President Joe Biden presiding over the chamber. Senate Republicans forced a pair of changes to the reconciliation bill overnight, sending it back to the House for a final vote later Thursday.

Democrats believe the minor changes – to language regarding Pell Grants for low-income students – won’t derail House passage, meaning that Democrats are set to finally conclude the legislative struggle needed to make health reform a reality.

As you can see from the prose above from Politico,the establishment media is in a state of near orgasm over the imminent final passage of the Obamacare package, as the average left wing journalist is overjoyed to “finally conclude the legislative struggle needed to make health reform a reality.” That is actually fairly tame compared to the NYT, who declares just now that

The NYT, in a moment of candor, admits that the procedural trickery engaged in by Senate Democrats was successful in avoiding the will of the American people as embodied by the election of Senator Scott Brown (D-MA) in January 2010 on a platform of explicit opposition to Obamacare and a promise to be the “41st vote” to stop Obamacare in the Senate.

The Senate action appeared to be the penultimate step in a series of intricate legislation maneuvers that Democrats were forced to undertake after a Republican, Scott Brown, won a special Senate election in Massachusetts on Jan. 19, stripping Senate Democrats of the 60th vote that they needed to surmount Republican filibusters.

In a sane world, the “paper of record” in the United States would be troubled by Congress’s manipulation of its procedural rules to avoid the electoral will of the American people, but alas, the NYT has no such concerns, as in the very next paragraph the Times slips into its well-worn role as fawning Obama cheerleader, praising him for engineering the entire process of “intricate legislative maneuvers that the Democrats were forced to take” to subvert the will of the American people as expressed by the election of Scott Brown:

Many Democrats credited the president with having saved the legislation from the brink of collapse. He held a remarkable, day-long televised forum with Congressional leaders of both parties, lobbied for the overhaul in campaign-style rallies around the country, attacked abuses by private insurance companies, and repeatedly told the stories of everyday Americans who had suffered in the existing health system.

The Times appears to be a cheap date regarding the lavish praise it tosses out above for Obama, as everything they list as Obama’s “remarkable” actions are just standard, scripted political events that require little by way of unique or “unprecedented” skill sets to accomplish. It is odd for the “paper of record” to so explicitly celebrate the use of “intricate legislative maneuvers” and staged, scripted political events by DC officials to avoid the logical result of recent election results.

Indeed, the fact that the Democrats did indeed manage to make history by switching, midstream, from a bill passed via regular order to a reconciliation bill, would have merited a mention from the “paper of record”. However, the NYT fails to note this “unprecedented” legislative trickery by Obama and the Demcrats, but it was noted by ardently ideological leftist Lawrence O’Donnell.  The entire uncut O’Donnell appearance on Morning Joe on March 12, 2010 can be seen here.  O’Donnell notes the “unprecedented” nature of the Democrats’ plan to switch gears after Scott Brown’s Senate victory and pursue reconciliation to pass Obamacare:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Will Democrats get health care passed?

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: I’m going to say what I’ve said all along in my humble approach to this subject.  I, having worked on this kind of legislation on the Senate floor, trying to get it passed, and in committee.  I do not see how they can do this.  Now, and part of that is because it’s never been done before. And they have moved into a legislative territory that has never previously existed.  The Republicans have not been very smart about trying to describe this. It’s difficult to describe.  But this is unprecedented, using reconciliation this way. Because what they’ve done, is that they’ve abandoned a bill in mid-conference. The Senate passed a bill, the House passed a bill. They were in mid-conference negotiating this bill, in conference, and they said it’s going to be impossible for us to pass it now because of Scott Brown, so we’re going to abandon conferencing this bill and move over to another legislative vehicle, called reconciliation.  To handle something you’ve already been legislating another way, now, that’s never occurred before.

SCARBOROUGH: That’s never happened?

O’DONNELL: Never, never, never.

When the history books are written about the passage of Obamacare, perhaps this unprecedented legislative trickery, now completed, by Democrats to accomplish a nullification of the election of Scott Brown (R-MA) will garner more attention.  For now, the establishment media is sure to continue in near orgasm mode, with lavish praise for media hero Obama and his merry band of Democrats.

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Obama Flip Flops, OK’s “Unpopular Deal-Sweetening Measures” To Buy Obamacare Votes

Monday, March 15th, 2010

President Barack Obama Flip Flopped on the backroom, special interest deals in Obamacare, now allowing them to remain in the legislation in the hopes of buying Congressional votes and toasting the passage of Obamacare within a week

President Barack Obama has flip flopped today, embracing the kind of backroom deals he campaigned against in 2008 and even recently condemned in the Senate health care package, as he heads to Ohio to begin the final push to gain passage of his massive comprehensive health care reform plan known as Obamacare.  The fact that Obama has decided to accept these unpopular, backroom special interest deals at this critical moment regarding the signature initiative of his Presidency could come to define the Obama brand for years to come.  Indeed, Specific pork in the Obamacare package intended to purchase votes, such as those of Dem. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), Dem. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CN) and Dem. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), will now remain in the final Obamacare package to be voted upon by the House of Representatives this week:

WASHINGTON – Still seeking votes for his proposed health care overhaul, President Barack Obama appears ready to reverse his position and allow unpopular deal-sweetening measures in the hopes of finding Democratic support for legislation whose future will be decided in coming days.

Taking a new position, Axelrod said the White House only objects to state-specific arrangements, such as an increase in Medicaid funding for Nebraska, ridiculed as the “Cornhusker Kickback.” That’s being cut, but provisions that could affect more than one state are OK, Axelrod said.

That means deals sought by senators from Montana and Connecticut would be fine — even though Gibbs last week singled them out as items Obama wanted removed. There was resistance, however, from two committee chairman, Democratic Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, and the White House has apparently backed down.

It appears that the claims of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs regarding the need to remove the special pork-laden deals for individual Democratic senators were designed solely to win a news cycle from the compliant establishment media, not actually improve the Obamacare legislation by removing such backroom deals. At the end of the day, the only change to the 100’s of pages of special interest pork in Obamacare to be made is the extension of the special Medicare deal for Nebraska, known as the “Cornhusker Kickback”, to all states, which, of course, will increase the amount of federal deficit spending that will result if Obamacare passes.

In Ohio, instead of focusing on the substance of the Obamacare legislation, or the special backroom deals he allegedly wants to remove from same, President Obama will focus on the individual story of Natoma Canfield and try to use that person’s misfortune to sell his policies to America:

Meanwhile, the White House tried to increase public pressure on Congress to pass the legislation. Obama planned to visit Strongsville, Ohio, home of cancer patient Natoma Canfield, who wrote the president she gave up her health insurance after it rose to $8,500 a year. Obama repeatedly has cited that letter from a self-employed cleaning worker who lives in the Cleveland suburb to illustrate the urgency of the massive overhaul.

Canfield’s sister, Connie Anderson, was scheduled to introduce Obama at that event.

This use of individual anecdote was the same strategy employed by Obama and the Democrats at the health care summit a few weeks ago, and the benefit of this strategy is to allow Obama to make an emotional appeal without focusing too much on the quite ugly realities of the legislative language itself (such as the payoffs to Baucus and Dodd) and the even ugilier realities of the procedural trickery to be used by Democrats this week in the House (“Slaughter Solution”) and the Senate (reconciliation).

Politico confirmed just now that the “Slaughter Solution” is now being pushed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for use on the Obamacare package to allow the House to “deem” the bill passed without actually voting on it:

The so-called solution, named for House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), would “deem” the Senate bill passed if House Democrats approve a package of fixes.

In other words, House members wouldn’t have to formally cast a vote on a bill that most of them don’t want to defend on the campaign trail — but it would pass anyway.

The speaker told her rank and file Friday that the decision was still up in the air but she thought this was the way most of her members wanted to handle the Senate bill.

The Newsweek article by David Stone from Friday, March 12, 2010 which strongly condemned any move to use the “Slaughter Solution”, excerpted by CentristNet here, has now been pulled from Newsweek’s site, clearly indicating that the establishment media is circling the wagons and set to push the “Slaughter Solution” over the finish line. Indeed, the talking points released by Democrats on Friday refer to such issues as the arguably unconstitutional “Slaughter Solution” and the use of reconciliation in the Senate as “inside baseball” and not worthy of discussion with the public. Considering Obama is starting the week by flip flopping on the sweetheart, backroom deals in Obamacare, whether the public catches on to the unprecedented procedural trickery planned in the House and Senate could determine the fate of the bill.

UPDATE: Ed at Hotair points out that the Democrats have now unveiled their 2300 page “Shell bill”, a copy of which can be found here, to start the process of the “Slaughter Solution”:

According to Heritage and Philip Klein, this is a shell bill, not the actual proposed reconciliation bill. It’s a copy of the version from last autumn. Later this week, the House will gut this version and replace it with their new ObamaCare fixes. However, the student loan nationalization will remain in the bill, so it’s not entirely old hat.

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