This morning, Democracy Now! had a segment, "How Safe Is Your Ballot? Tracking Voter Suppression, Intimidation on Election Day", with Wendy Weiser, of the Brennan Center for Justice. They talked at first about some of the various different "voter fraud" campaigns the Republicans are mounting, and in particular about Harris County, Texas, and the voter intimidation there. But then the discussion turned to the broader issue of how many people were not being registered in the first place:
AMY GOODMAN: The Brennan Center has also found registration patterns vary from state to state. But more than 26 percent fewer new voters registered in Florida this year than in 2006, along with 21 percent fewer in Maryland, almost 17 percent fewer in Tennessee. What does this mean?
WENDY WEISER: Yeah, we've been seeing a troubling pattern this year of dropping registration rates. They are much lower than they've been in many states from prior midterm elections. And one of the reasons for this--and this has raised some concern--is that there are far fewer efforts to register voters. We don't see large-scale voter registration drives out there the way there have been in past election cycles.
AMY GOODMAN: Like the disbanding of ACORN.
WENDY WEISER: Like the disbanding of ACORN, but this is--it's not only ACORN that's been affected by this attack on voter registration groups. Many groups that used to register voters aren't out there registering voters now.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
WENDY WEISER:I think there was some kind of climate of fear created by those attacks on registration groups that have made it much more difficult for people to do that. This was a civic good that people were doing out of civic virtue, and they were worried about being attacked for engaging in these kinds of activities. In some cases, it's been laws that were passed that make it very difficult.
AMY GOODMAN:So this, the right's attack on ACORN and the congressional attack on ACORN, which was unprecedented, the disbanding of ACORN, not only affected this largest voter registration organization in the country, but had ripple effects everywhere.
WENDY WEISER: That is what we think has happened, yes.
This is the war we are fighting. Make no mistake. It is a war. It is a war for the right to vote. Whatever happens today, that war will continue. And we need to step it up.
The Democratic Party is spending nearly 100 million dollars raised in part from foreign contributions to help elect more immigration reform minded men and women to Congress.
If you happen to be a conservative of the Grand Old tea Party variety, how does such startling "amnesty" related news make you feel?
Suspicious? Fearful? Angry? Perhaps even more xenophobic than usual?
Each of those emotional responses would be expected from tea partiers had the Democratic Party actually taken this foreign money -- it has not.
The "U.S." Chamber of Commerce however, is a different story entirely.
This week saw the demise of ACORN followed by its most solid vindication from the California Attorney General's office, juxtaposed with the Catholic Church's spiraling descent into incoherent babbling as more than half a century of criminal conspiracy in hiding and protecting child molesters finally threatens to demand a full accounting.
The fact that ACORN could be destroyed by lies despite no criminal activity, while the Catholic Church has avoided any criminal penalties for engaging in conduct that the Mafia wouldn't forgive speaks volumes about the state of hegemonic struggle in America and the world today.
This is not about Catholic-bashing. The countless victims of these unspeakable crimes were all Catholics. It's about the patriarchal hierarchy, which has long outlived not only its usefulness, but its moral credibility as well. Sinead O'Connor--herself a victim of (non-sexual) child abuse by the church--in an eloquent Op-Ed put it squarely when she called the Pope and his co-conspirators the churches "alleged leaders", after explaining:
To Irish Catholics, Benedict's implication -- Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem -- is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn't believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is. Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That's how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him.
On Monday, Democracy Now discussed the Church's pedophilia coverup crisis with Bridget Mary Meehan, a dissident female bishop, who is part of a growing movement to reform and transform the Church from below, along transparent, egalitarian, non-sexist lines. (Her blog is here.) In the interview, she said:
This is very, very serious, because standards of accountability must apply from the top down. There needs to be an entire shake-up of the whole Catholic system. And we need to begin by truth-telling. Roman Catholic Womenpriests are calling for a truth commission, made up of the non-ordained, the victims, and people of integrity, to examine the crisis in its implications for Church structure, for renewal, for reform. And we believe that any structural change must include the end of mandatory celibacy, married priest, and women priest. We must really change the way the Church does business and become a more accountable, open, transparent and just Church.
Hopefully, this extremely painful episode (an "episode" only in millenia-long history of the church sense) will eventuate in a radical transformation of the Church that will leave it much closer to the original communal and collegial form it had when it was the church of the Roman Empire's multi-cultural, multi-racial underclass--not the church of the Empire.
The four young men arrested last week for allegedly attempting to tamper with the phones at the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) have ties to Republican politicians, conservative think tanks, radical campus activists, and even the intelligence community.
It appears that Landrieu was targeted, at least indirectly, because of her stance on health care reform. Two of the men posed as telephone repairmen while a third taped them with his cell phone. A fourth alleged accomplice was arrested in a car a few blocks away.
Right wing operative James O'Keefe, famous for posing as a pimp to "expose" unethical behavior at the anti-poverty group ACORN, claimed that he and his crew were trying to expose a problem with the phones at Landrieu's office which were keeping constituents from reaching her.
Constituents getting a busy signal?
O'Keefe says they wanted to embarrass Landrieu by exposing whatever was wonky about her phones, but that justification strains credulity. Defenders of the four implied that Landrieu's people might have somehow disabled their own phones to avoid angry constituents. Supposedly, these citizens wanted to express their outrage at Landrieu's decision to vote for the Senate health reform bill in exchange for a line item to give Louisiana an additional $300 million federal health care dollars.
Some callers have reported trouble getting through to their representatives. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones reports that members of the Tea Party movement have complained to her about not being able to get through to their members of congress. She tried calling some senators and also had a hard time getting through to a real person.
Now that he's out of jail, O'Keefe is furiously spinning his activities as investigative journalism gone awry, according to Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker. O'Keefe told Sean Hannity in an interview that these tactics were standard journalistic tools. But let's be realistic, here. Impersonating a repairman to covertly access a Senator's phones is more Watergate burglar than Woodward and Bernstein.
O'Keefe's activist theater
O'Keefe and his buddies are political operatives who come out of the world of right wing campus organizing, as Dave Weigel reports for the Washington Independent. Over the years, they've earned notoriety by using various forms of political theater and media to advance their issues. O'Keefe and Ben Wetmore, a fellow activist who let the alleged tamperers crash at his house before the Landrieu operation, even got married to each other to illustrate that shady people can marry each other for benefits, just like with straight marriage. On his now-defunct blog, Countermedia, Wetmore urged conservative activists to target seniors with a health care robocall featuring a Barack Obama impersonator.
The Landrieu crew is no stranger to more traditional forms of conservative politics, either. O'Keefe and Wetmore both formerly worked for the conservative Leadership Institute, a group that funds political training for right wing activists. Fake repairman Robert Flanagan interned for Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and a GOP congresswoman. O'Keefe was revealed to be on the payroll of the right wing news site Big Government at the time of his arrest.
The Landrieu incident is a continuation of their campaign to use guerrilla video for political dirty tricks. O'Keefe became famous last year for videos that appear to show him dressing up as a pimp and soliciting questionable advice from ACORN staffers. The video touched off a panic that led to ACORN's federal funding being yanked.
Links to the intelligence community
Maybe they hoped to make the news rather than break it. The men are charged with attempting to tamper with Landrieu's phones, not just observe them. As I reported for AlterNet last week, one of the alleged tamperers has longstanding ties to the intelligence community.
In 2008, Stan Dai was the deputy director of a recruiting program for aspiring spies at Trinity Washington University. As Sahil Kapur reported in Raw Story, this program was funded by a $250,000 grant from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Yesterday, Laura Flanders interviewed Dr. David Price and me on GRITtv about the links between O'Keefe's crew and the intelligence community. Dr. Price is an anthropologist who studies the relationship between the intelligence community and academia. He has been keeping a close eye so-called "centers of academic excellence" funded by the intelligence community on college campuses.
Right now, most of what we know about the incident comes from a single affidavit from an FBI officer and leaks from law enforcement. We'll probably learn a lot more about the men and their motives if they go on trial.
'Very, very close' to passing reform
In other health care news, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told participants on a conference call yesterday that Democrats are "very, very close" to passing health care reform. According to Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, who was on the call, Pelosi signaled that the House will not pass a bill until the Senate passes a list of modifications to be reinserted during budget reconciliation. Brian Beutler of TPM DC reports that progressives shouldn't get their hopes up for reviving the public option: Pelosi conceded that a public option lacks the necessary support in the Senate.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
O'Keefe was made infamous for posing as a pimp in a conservative plot against ACORN.
He was arrested this week for plotting to wiretap the phones of a United States Senator and named in an FBI criminal complaint.
He faces up to ten years in jail and a $250,000 fine, and was ordered by a judge to live with his parents until the next hearing- on $10,000 bail.
He is on for Monday to speak at the nation's "oldest and largest public affairs forum".
Eric Boehlert is right. The right-wing pushes a partisan propaganda agenda as a placeholder for "journalism" and credible institutions like the Commonwealth Club lap it up. Shame on them.
I just spoke with a staffer who now said it's "up in the air" and transferred me over to Caroline, who is actually in charge of the event. Please drop them a line and tell them right-wing propaganda artists in costumes who are currently under arrest for plots against U.S. Senators are not "journalists". Caroline is in charge of the event, but contacting the President is also important. Please leave any response you get in the comments.
The conservative videographer who donned a pimp suit to embarrass the anti-poverty group ACORN was arrested in New Orleans, LA for allegedly conspiring to bug the office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.
It's not clear why Landrieu was targeted, but many suspect that she was singled out because she played a pivotal role in advancing health care reform.
Filmmaker James O'Keefe and three other men have been charged with been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony, according to Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker. At RH Reality Check, Rachel Larris notes that, if convicted, the four could face up to 10 years in prison.
Like chum in the conservative shark tank
Landrieu, a conservative Democrat, negotiated an extra $100 million in Medicaid funds for Louisiana in exchange for allowing the health care bill to come to the senate floor. Accepting health care for the poor in the interest of health reform was like chum in the conservative shark tank.
Rush Limbaugh called her the most expensive prostitute of all time. "She may be easy, but she's not cheap," crowed Glenn Beck. It got so bad that Democrats call on Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) was called upon to denounce the chorus of conservatives attacking his fellow Louisiana senator as a prostitute. (Correction: Vitter did not call Landrieu a prostitute.)
O'Keefe must have realized that an exposé of Mary Landrieu would be a hot commodity.
"This is Watergate meets YouTube," said Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief
Health care reform in limbo
The arrests could not have come at a better time for the Democrats. Health care reform is in limbo as congressional leaders plan their next move after losing their filibuster-proof majority. The bugging scandal is deflecting attention from tense internal negotiations.
Brian Beutler of TPMDC reports that the House Democrats are converging on a strategy to get reform done: The House will pass the Senate bill and the Senate will fix it through budget reconciliation.
The Republican counter-strategy
While the Democrats agonize over what to do next, that senate Republicans are honing strategies to thwart any Democratic attempt to pass health care reform through budget reconciliation, as Dave Weigel reports in the Washington Independent. The reconciliation process allows both sides to vote on unlimited number of amendments. GOP leadership is hinting that if Dems take the reconciliation route, they will be forced to vote on every politically embarrassing amendment the opposition can dream up.
The stakes are high. In the American Prospect, Paul Starr reminds progressives that there's till a lot worth fighting for, even without a public option. For all its faults, the Senate bill would still cover 30 million uninsured Americans, expand Medicaid, end discrimination based on preexisting conditions, and set up exchanges designed to keep rising insurance premiums in check.
A memo for reform
Finally, our sources tell us that Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly is making quite a stir on Capitol Hill with his memo advising the House Democratic caucus on the need to forge ahead with health care reform. In 1994, conservative commentator William Kristol wrote a health care memo to Republicans that became the backbone of their anti-reform strategy, even up to the present day. Benen hopes his memo will be a useful counterweight for Democrats. Benen warns the Democrats that it's far riskier to fail than to pass reform that doesn't please everyone.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
It's that time of year again. Some have vowed to hit the gym more often. Others are swearing off cigarettes. For some, coffee has been replaced with copious amounts of socialist green tea. Still others are signing up for community service projects to help improve the world around them.
Yes, many Americans have made their New Year's resolutions. Perhaps the conservative media establishment should do the same.
This week, an independent review of ACORN (pdf here), run by by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, found serious but correctable problems with the organization that were organizational, not criminal in nature, and that reflected an overall lack of coordinated national management and unified purpose--the exact opposite of the centralized, highly disciplined super-secret organization that conservatives have long fantasized about.
While the report pulls no punches in citing nine significant reports that need to be made, it says that "The following nine (9) recommendations, discussed in detail in Section VII, are neither an epitaph nor an absolution for ACORN, but are a roadmap to reform and renewal, if implemented in their entirety in concert with other measures to regain the public's trust."
Regarding the videos used to attack ACORN, the report finds that "The released videos offer no evidence of a pattern of illegal conduct by ACORN employees," that "The ACORN employees captured on video were members or part-time staff. They were not organizers or supervisory level employees," and that "There is no evidence that any action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by ACORN employees on behalf of the videographers."
Thus they were evidence of significant managerial and organizational deficiencies, but were not evidence of anything criminal.
In a separate development, a federal court ruled that the cut-off of funds to ACORN was unconstitutional, violating the prohibition on bills of attainder. (NY Times story here.)
The report itself was focused on diagnosing organizational culpability and problems, not on any sort of overall evaluation of ACORN's social contributions, although some notice was made of the scope of its work. In contrast, a number of progressive leaders weighed in to not just to support ACORN in making the identified changes, but also to stress the value and importance of its past accomplishments. These included Nan Aron, President, Alliance for Justice, Wade Henderson, President and CEO, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Alan Charney, Program Director, USAction, Benjamin Todd Jealous, NAACP President and CEO and Hilary Shelton, NAACP Senior Vice President for Policy and Advocacy, Robert L. Borosage, Co-Director, Campaign for America's Future, Eric Burns, President, Media Matters for America, and Bill Quigley, Legal Director, Center for Constitutional Rights.
On the flip--excerpt of NY Times story on federal court ruling, text of statements from most of the above leaders, and excerpts from the report including the full list of recommendations, a description of organizational structure and problems, and a list of findings about the videos, and a final comment.
Republished from Random Lengths News, December 4, 2009 Issue. My contribution to pushing back against the rightwing war on ACORN.
Behind the Lies About ACORN
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
In the summer of 2009, two young conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute-and occasionally other characters-approached at least 10 local offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN. Among other things, they asked advice on taxes and a business venture that involved underage illegal immigrant girls from El Salvador. ACORN employees at some offices asked them to leave, at two (at least), the police were called, and one staffer recorded them on a cell phone. Los Angeles was one place they were kicked out. But staffers in four offices-San Diego, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Brooklyn-fell for the act, and offered to help them, with advice on taxes and buying a home.
Within a week of the tapes being released, and causing a media firestorm, Congress took the unusual step of specifically defunding ACORN by name, without even pretending to investigate-even though ACORN itself had already fired the staffers involved, and was moving to make its own investigation, headed by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger.
The defunding was so unusual that it's almost certainly unconstitutional, a violation of Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 of which provides that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed." A bill of attainder singles out individuals or groups for punishment without benefit of trial, and violates the bedrock principle of separation of powers. On November 12, ACORN filed suit to nullify the defunding as unconstitutional.
Systemic Lessons From The Rightwing Defunding Attack On ACORN
I'm working on an article about ACORN for Random Lengths News, for which I interviewed Nathan Henderson-James, currently ACORN's Director of Online Campaigns, which I also intended to present here at Open Left in some form. I was particularly struck by the following brief part of the interview, where I ask about the difference between how the right defends its own, and how the left generally fails to--and certainly did fail when ACORN was attacked most recently.
Nathan specifically says that he's not speaking for ACORN, but simply offering his own personal views, which, nonetheless do come from someone who witnessed what happened from the inside. And they accord 100% with my views, as someone who witneesed it from the outside. But the importance of what he has to say goes far beyond the case of the recent attacks on ACORN. In fact, they go right to the heart of one of the real reasons why single payer was excluded from consideration--a reason that has nothing to do with the supposed perfidy of everyone you can name and everything to do with the left's failure to organize itself for the true magnitude of the struggle we're engaged in.
OL:The natural thing that came to me was 'wait a minute, Blackwater kills people, and they're still getting hundreds of millions of dollars. I really had to scratch my head over that. And so what I'd like to ask you was, that sort of contrast between how you were savagely attacked, without even having hearings, and the way we have lawsuits, and people invoking state secrets, and all kinds of stuff with Blackwater, and what that says about the difference between the right and the left in terms of how they organize politically to protect their own. Any comments about that?
Nathan Henderson-James:
From a progressive's political point of view I think what this-this is a a personal observation, not an organizational observation- This is my own personal, this is not an ACORN position--is that it really points out how the progressive movement is not a movement. It is a bunch of people who share a political vision for America, but do it from the feet of several independent organizations that do not have an infrastructure that allows them to communicate quickly with each other, and create ways so that they can function much more as if they wre part of a unified movement, rather than a bunch of organizations that share a bunch of policy goals, but have a huge set of different methodologies for achieving those goals.
Media manipulation by the right-wing to influence public perception has been a decade-long tactic to undermine voter registration in America. While the current media frenzy surrounding the community organization ACORN is only partly related to voter registration efforts, it is important to note that the attacks have been built on a foundation of misinformation and media manipulation by the right-wing over several years, largely surrounding the myth of "voter fraud."
Appearing on Hannity to promote his latest book, America for Sale, author Jerome Corsi purported to explain the causes of the mortgage bubble by advancing a litany of falsehoods and misinformation: repeating the myth that the Community Reinvestment Act was responsible for the bubble; claiming that President Obama was tied to the housing bubble through conservative bogeyman ACORN; and falsely suggesting that Obama lowered interest rates to "zero or close to zero." Corsi has previously written falsehood-laden books about Obama and Sen. John Kerry, has claimed that Obama posted online a "false, fake birth certificate," and has a history of controversial comments about Islam, Catholicism, progressives, and other matters.
What's wrong with this? Superficially, it's easy: the CRA was not responsible for the housing bubble-rather it was non-CRA, non-bank institutions that lead the way, ACORN fought against irresponsible lending practices, both with respect to CRA- and non-CRA-based lending, and Obama's limited tangential connections with ACORN had nothing to do with ACORN's low-income-housing advocacy. These basic points have already been well established long ago--at least for those of us who have been paying attention. But to understand why this sort of constellation of lies recurs again and again, regardless of previous refutations, we need a framework of understanding at a higher of abstraction, taking note of how conservative ideology, narratives and fundamental cognitive practice commonly function. At the highest level, I suggest we need to understand five things:
(1) Conservative ideology characteristically generates narratives of blame directed at low-status outgroups, holding them responsible for all of society's ills. (Blacks, Jews, immigrants, gays, etc.) So naturally, it will blame the sorts of people ACORN is working to help.
(2) Conservative narratives routinely impute selfish motives and conspiratorial methods reflecting their own disowned common practices (or those of their elite heroes) to liberal shadow elites working in cahoots with low-status outgroups. This would be anyone who works with ACORN--even a lawyer representing them on a single case, such as Barack Obama.
(3) Conservative narratives routinely deny systemic explanations ( Kegan Levels 4 &5) for social ills, affirming the just order of the world-at least when run by conservatives (Kegan Level 3)-and blaming ills on the disordering of that world, particularly elevating the status of "undesireables" (those whose enduring dispositions at Kegan Level 2 mark them as essentially evil or at lest inferior).
(4) Causation is associational--Shawn Rosenberg's "sequential reasoning"--things follow an identified pattern, the pattern is the explanation, rather than "linear" (one cause->one effect) or systematic (multiple causes and effects, including potentially circular causality). Such "reasoning" is immune to logical, empirical or rational refutation, since it has no consistent foundations, but only, at best, the outward appearance of them. Furthermore, the patterns are mutable, and can be changed at the drop of a hat.
(5) The deep background of such "reasoning" includes a combination of the "Bullshit Epistemoloy" (that there is no objective truth, the only truth is fidelity to one's "true self"), and collective narcissism which implicitly celebrates conservative identity. This combination reinforces and synergizes with the characteristic of associational reasoning to fundamentally resist any possibility of logical, empirical or rational refutation.
ACORN continues to face virulent attacks from Glenn Beck and Company, but, unfortunately, diarists have not been asking the netroots to pony up financial support, despite the fact that raising large amounts of small donor dollars is one of the netroots greatest strengths.
Follow me below and I will make my case for a large scale netroots fundraiser.
There was a post at RedState I read over the weekend, "Defending Against an Alinsky Campaign", that illuminated Glenn Beck's and other conservative tactics recently for me. In graduate school, I took a grassroots politics class in which I read Alinsky's Reveille for Radicals, which actually predated his more well-known and popular Rules for Radicals. In it, he discusses the necessity of taking an opponent, "fixating" on an element or characteristic that could be blown up, "personalizing" it/her/him for the general public to match a negative perception with the name, and "humiliating" it/her/him as much as possible until you win. You see this to a limited extent with Van Jones- which wasn't even reported in many major outlets before he resigned, and certainly much of the public could not name who he was. But you see it to a smaller extent with Yosi Sergant with the NEA. And you see it big-time with ACORN. The two videographers fixated on what could be blown up (getting a few employees to screw up), and then with the noise machine's help, personalized ACORN and made the employees emblematic of the organization as a whole.
The attacks are seemingly unrelated, but I expect to see more that are related to the original personalizations- e.g., a petition asking those affiliated with ACORN to step down. And in some cases, they don't even need to do it. As Paul wrote last night, Democratic members of Congress- many of whom benefited greatly from ACORN's voter registration efforts over the years and advertised their close ties with ACORN- have already distanced themselves. Obama, who himself represented ACORN in a lawsuit and was affiliated in other ways with the group throughout the late 1990s, called for an investigation. I don't see what Obama did as cowardly as Congressional Dems' actions, since even ACORN's chief organizer called for the same, but it adds to the pile-on and keeps the story in the news. It works in what one colleague calls concentric circles- personalize and attack those closest to the organization, then attack those close to those you just attacked, and so forth.
The whole episode got me thinking of response tactics and a failure in organizing to stop this in its tracks. One of my favorite posts by Matt Stoller was one he wrote around failure to stop Alito's nomination and tactics that could have been pursued, but were not. There was organizing here that could have been pursued, but was not. One response that perhaps should have been pursued is similar to what Wes Boyd and Joan Blades of MoveOn.org did in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal- make the ask to "censure and move on". Slap someone/an organization on the wrist, but recognize there are a few bad apples in every organization/corporation, and that there are bigger problems. The advantage to this is that our esteemed Democratic leaders in Congress, in this kind of situation, are looking for an easy out, something to kill this story and give them something to say when a CNN reporter sticks a microphone in their face about it. A resolution is much preferable to de-funding just as a resolution is preferable to impeachment.
Another was to organize to ask for support prior to such a vote. We, including myself, should have organized earlier for a statement of support from those who benefit most/have the closest ties to ACORN, found a Progressive Block that could have blocked a defunding vote (similar to Chris' theory around holding a Block to stand firm on the public option and other key issues), and worked to lock them in. ACORN's tool to ask your member of Congress to stand firm is another step towards this.
The one problem with the latter tactic, at least, is that we operate in a media environment where pressure to de-fund, disaffiliate, distance oneself from, etc. builds like a head of steam in 24 hours, and makes it difficult to organize that kind of larger effort. The Alito nomination and the whip count on health care took months. We didn't have that kind of time. Regardless, once the Senate vote came down, something needed to happen quickly, and it didn't. Progressive movement actors, myself included, have to learn from this episode and figure out where we all went wrong in working to support those attacked. Other organizations/people will soon find themselves in a similar situation. The writer at RedState suggested targeting purple-district Congressional Dems themselves with the same Alinsky tactics and force the already-cautious among them to distance themselves from Obama. I can see this having policy implications, such as around LGBT issues. This can all snowball quickly. It is important to learn from these episodes and figure out a quicker rapid-response.
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