Showing that the people that sit in front of the cameras at the Networks aren’t really journalists, but are merely pleasant looking readers of Teleprompters, Diane Sawyer of ABC News sonorously informed readers that the Occupy-Whatever protests have now “spread to 1,000 countries.”

Speaking of Wall Street, we thought we’d bring you up to date on those protesters, the Occupy Wall Street movement. As of tonight, it has spread to more than 250 American cities, more than a thousand countries — every continent but Antarctica.

Only there’s a small problem with that claim. There’s only 195 countries in the world.

The coverage of these disjointed, hollow, and pointless Occupy-Whatever protests have received is far more positive and extensive than the Tea Party protests ever got. This particular report is a perfect example of this bias.

While Diane Sawyer pumps up the viewers into imagining that “1,000 countries” are now supporting the Occupy-Whatevers, her report goes on to indulge in class warfare meant to make anyone that doesn’t earn a million dollars hate everyone that does.

Notice that the report does not note how much the top income earners in the U.S. pay in taxes. The Heritage Foundation has a great graphic to inform us of that.

Diane Sawyer doesn’t want to report facts like that, though. After all, those facts tend to soften her class warfare message.

ABC isn’t the only one, though. As Newsbusters notes, a report by NBC even stooped to the depths of exploiting kids to push the Occupy-Whatever message. Mara Schiavocampo of NBC Nightly News showed a little girl who pleaded, “I want to make the world to be a better place.”

Oh, how cute. But what does that mean? How do these protestors want to make a better world?

Let’s face it, it is impossible to call these protests a “movement.” The Tea Party movement was a movement. While not centrally controlled, the Tea Partiers had goals and the bulk of them have solidified into organizations with actual political goals and interests. These Occupy-Whatevers have no goals, no coherent idea of what they want… in short there’s no there, there.

Worse, we are finding that many of these protesters are being paid to protest by left-wing ACORN affiliated groups. No Tea Parties were ever astroturffed like this.

One final note about Sawyer’s bad report. It’s a small point, but amusing for the fact that she is supposed to be an ace communicator. If you’ll listen carefully you’ll notice that she can’t even pronounce the word Antarctica correctly. She calls it Ant-art-ica. So much for professionalism, eh?

Also see All American Blogger for some good points.

An attack on the right to vote is underway across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging. But it’s happening here, so there’s barely a whimper.

Got that? One Man, one vote, is somehow anti-democratic……well, yeah, because if Democrats have to actually show an ID to vote, they won’t be able to get dead people, illegal aliens, and foreigners to vote Democratic Party, as well as having Democrats vote more than once. I remember back in 2008, receiving a new voter ID card from the Wake County Board of Elections. Except, it wasn’t addressed to me. Didn’t have my name on it. Was a woman’s name. Black. Democrat. Lived in Charlotte, NC. I know the last because the voter rolls showed her as registered in Mecklenburg County. It would have been easy to vote in Charlotte, then drive to Raleigh. Obviously, I reported this to the Elections Board, who, well, did something.

The laws are being passed in the name of preventing “voter fraud.” But study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem — and is less of a problem than how hard many states make it for people to vote in the first place. Some of the new laws, notably those limiting the number of days for early voting, have little plausible connection to battling fraud.

Remember when voter fraud was a big deal among Democrats? Remember their caterwauling about stolen elections? Which mostly disappeared when they won Congress in 2006, and the White House in 2008. But, they are worried about losing the Senate and White House in 2012, so, they need every edge they can get. And making sure that liberals can vote multiple times, along with the dead voting, is an important measure.

Oh, and then there’s this New Mexico study, which showed 64,000 issues of possible voter fraud in the 2008 election. Obviously, requiring ID to vote is not a perfect idea, because illegals and foreigners are using said ID to vote (you’d think Democrats would approve of this), so, the obvious solution is to stop giving American ID to foreigners.

These statutes are not neutral. Their greatest impact will be to reduce turnout among African Americans, Latinos and the young. It is no accident that these groups were key to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 — or that the laws in question are being enacted in states where Republicans control state governments.

See? It’s raaaaacist. Because, in Dionne’s World, Blacks and Latinos are too poor to afford an ID card, something required for writing a check, driving, taking a plane flight, using a credit card, signing a contract for a new cell phone, renting a car…we use ID lots of places. Not sure about you, but I was itching to get my drivers license, and took my test on my birthday.

In part because of a surge of voters who had not cast ballots before, the United States elected its first African American president in 2008. Are we now going to witness a subtle return of Jim Crow voting laws?

Democrats know that requiring ID would only solve some of the issue: people can easily spoof with fake IDs or with their regular ID. What they want to accomplish with this line is to set it up so that when Obama loses, they can blame the GOP, saying that Obama lost not because of his being the most incompetent president ever, but for their “racist” and “anti-democracy” voting policies.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Patriots and activists from 23 states are about to gather together on March 25 and 26 in Houston, Texas to attend the True The Vote Summit, an effort to make “true” the electoral system in every polling place in the country, to stop voter fraud, and to quash the intimidation of voters. Organizers hope to make sure that we again have free and fair elections.

A local Harris County activist group named The The King Street Patriots built the True The Vote Summit upon their experiences of attempting to “true” the 2010 election in Harris County, Texas.

Back before the recent election, the KSP got together to try and find out what sort of shape the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas were in. What they found was shocking. Due to its investigation, an ACORN organizer was exposed for having registered over 23,000 fake voters in the county. The story made national news.

With that success under their belts the KSPers and their chief Catherine Engelbrecht decided to step it up a notch. And so, during the 2010 midterm election, the group set out to organize citizen poll watchers to monitor every polling place in Harris County. The goal was to make sure that what went on in each polling place followed the letter of the law, was free of cheating and fraud, and was open and welcoming for every voter.

Naturally the floodgates of hate were opened upon them. Leftist agitators let loose a smear campaign against these patriotic folks calling them haters, racists, and worse. The Black Panthers even came out in force to intimidate both the KSP and the voters they were observing.

The attacks on the True The Vote Summit have also continued unabated by the left today. So we know how the left is worried about this movement. Vote fraud is almost exclusively practiced by Democrats and left-wing activists in this country, so an effort like this threatens their operations.

Despite all the attacks they underwent, the King Street Patriots were buoyed by their success in stopping vote fraud during the 2010 elections and with that experience to guide them they now want to offer their assistance and to relay the tools they’ve developed to stop vote fraud to any and every state in the union. The result is the True The Vote Summit to be held March 25 and 26 in Houston, Texas.

According to the event website:

Election fraud attacks the heart of our political system and threatens our rights as citizens.

When True the Vote began monitoring elections last fall in Houston, we were shocked at the fraud we discovered. Precinct judges often failed to check voters IDs, and some even filled out ballots to “help” people vote. These violations are just the tip of a very large and ugly iceberg.

If you are one of the millions of Americans outraged by corruption at the highest levels of our nation’s government, then you can help us stop fraud where it begins – at the polling place, in the precinct where you live, in the streets of your city.

If you care enough to help, contact us today to become part of our action plan. A commitment of just a few hours is all it takes to help restore truth and integrity to our elections.

Appearing to speak at the True The Vote National Summit will be New Media Mogul Andrew Breitbart, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, former Dept. of Justice attorney and Philadelphia Black Panthers whistleblower J. Christian Adams, ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCreif, former FEC commissioner Hans Von Spakovsky and others.

If you are ready to do your duty as an American to, as in Ben Franklin’s warning, “have our Republic and keep it” make haste to sign up to join the True The Vote Summit this month.

The left-wing website Talking Points Memo (known as TPM) is worried that the Tea Party-backed True The Vote effort in Harris County, Texas — home of the City of Houston — is going to successfully enlist Texans to join an effort to “true the vote” by battling vote fraud. Because of this fear, TPM has been trying to undermine the event with several left-slanted blog posts.

TPMs latest posting is artful for its vague accusations and spin, but it is short on any actual proof of the nefarious goals that the left-wing site is trying to ascribe to the True The Vote National Summit, coming up on March 25 and 26. Read closely TPM’s post also has the odd effect of coming to the support of vote fraud by seeming to discount the True The Vote event. Sadly, this dismissive attitude is of a piece with the left’s desire to shy people from paying attention to the massive vote fraud that they, themselves have been involved in for decades.

Typical of left-wing alarmism, TPM’s rhetoric casts suspicion on everything that True The Vote is trying to do, but never makes any actual accusations. For instance, of the addition of John Fund, Andrew Breitbart, and Hans von Spakovsky to the event program, TPM calls them “three of the biggest voter fraud alarmists in the country.” I guess from this we can assume that TPM doesn’t care about voter fraud because it is merely alarmism?

Further down in the piece, TPM discusses the vote fraud that the Obama-supported and later criminal organization ACORN was involved in. And like much of the rhetoric the left uses, TPM contradicts itself in just a few short lines.

First, TPM says this:

ACORN had been accused by conservatives of engaging in voter fraud.

Notice how TPM puts the onus on the conservatives and not ACORN. It is just conservatives “accusing” ACORN of vote fraud in TPM’s formulation. Notice how TPM uses its rhetoric to minimize the vote fraud as but the conservative’s “accusations.” Yet the very next sentence is this one:

Several employees of ACORN were prosecuted for defrauding the organization by submitting fraudulent voter registration forms, but those typically don’t lead to actual votes.

Notice that TPM tries to make the convictions for vote fraud seem less than it is. TPM said, “Several employees of ACORN were prosecuted…” Notice that TPM does not inform its readers that they were also convicted? Also notice that TPM tries to minimize the number of convictions to a meaningless handful by saying only “several” were “prosecuted.” The truth is, it has been far more than just “several.”

Additionally, if there were actual convictions for vote fraud, then it wasn’t merely conservative “accusations,” now was it? It isn’t a simple matter of partisan, right-wing accusation at all. It is FACT. There WAS voter fraud. And a lot of it.

In 1986 12 ACORN members were convicted of vote fraud in Missouri. In 2004, six more were convicted of it in St. Louis. In 2007 eight ACORN employees were convicted for vote fraud in The Show Me State. And these are just a few of the conviction just in Missouri alone. Over the last three decades or so, dozens and dozens of ACORN members and workers in affiliated organizations have been convicted of voter fraud.

It has hardly been only “several” ACORN members convicted of vote fraud.

Also all this poopooing of voter fraud tends to cause the reader to wonder if TPM is really in support of voter fraud? After all, that is the corresponding assumption when someone dismisses something. The impression is left that what is being dismissed is unimportant or not worth doing anything about. And TPM is dismissing vote fraud.

Naturally, the reason leftists like those at TPM dismiss voter fraud is because it is nearly exclusively a practice of the Democrat Party and has been for generations. Vote fraud is de rigueur for Democrats. No wonder TPM dismisses it. Vote fraud benefits their ideology!

And what exactly is so alarming or wrong with trying to make sure that the integrity of the vote is assured? Why should anyone be against making sure that our elections are “true”?

The left’s dismissing of this whole effort is telling, for sure.

Now, if you are in or near Houston, Texas and would like to attend the True The Vote National Summit visit the event info page now.

Just prior to the election we discovered that in the state of Nevada the former chief of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now’s (ACORN) affiliated Project Vote organization was under indictment for voter fraud. This week we learn that Amy Busefink has copped a plea deal on charges of illegally paying “bonus” payments to workers registering voters during the 2008 election.

Busefink entered a plea on two gross misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit the crime of compensating people for registering voters and faced 13 felony counts for the same. The fact that Busefink accepted this plea deal means that she as much as admitted that the state had the evidence to convict her.

Busefink will soon be sentenced.

Judge Donald Mosley is scheduled to sentence Busefink on Jan. 10. She probably will receive a $1,000 fine and up to 200 hours of community service, Stolworthy said. She faces a maximum of up to two years in jail and a $4,000 fine, according to Edie Cartwright, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general.

Naturally ACORN is pointing fingers at everyone else claiming that shadowy conservative groups are out to get Busefink. ACORN is also claiming that the charges against Busefink were specious. One wonders why the plea deal was so readily accepted if the charges were so absurd, of course.

This whole situation is just one more ice crystal in an avalanche of evidence tying ACORN to vote fraud and other illegal activities. It’s no wonder that ACORN has developed such a bad reputation. It’s also no wonder that skittish Congressmen have cut off federal funding for ACORN.

But that funding has not been permanently cut off. It can be restored at any time the Democrats get enough support to do so. On top of that ACORN is currently attempting to reinvent itself under a series of other names in order to escape its creditors.

ACORN has other troubles, too. Government auditors want ACORN to repay $3.2 million in federal funds meant to have been used for lead removal services that seem never to have been performed.

The federal funds were paid out to ACORN in 2004 and 2005 and were to be used to remove lead in low-income housing but federal investigators say that the money went to several ACORN affiliates and were used for political campaigns and fundraising instead of the congressionally approved purpose.

It should shock no one that ACORN claims that the government is out to get them and that all charges are false. Imagine that.

Via Big Government:

ACORN, a national organization whose mission included registering and turning out low-income and minority voters, announced on this election day that it was filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Founded in 1970, the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now had in recent years become a target of conservatives who accused the group of engaging in widespread voter fraud. It was forced to scale back its efforts after a scandal erupted, centered around undercover video footage that purported to show ACORN staff helping young activists posing as a pimp and prostitute engage in illegal activity.

Subsequent investigations found that the footage had been substantially edited, but the damage was done. Congress ultimately passed Republican-backed amendments to appropriations legislation that ended federal funding for the group.

“For over 40 years ACORN has fought the good fight,” Bertha Lewis, the group’s CEO, said in a news release today. But a “barrage of unmitigated accusations certainly took its toll,” and the “ongoing political onslaught caused irreparable harm.”

Ed Driscoll takes note of the perfect timing as well.

Ben Smith:

Filing for Chapter Seven means the group is being liquidated and selling off its remaining assets. Some of the group’s stronger local chapters continue under different names, and their leaders have discussed reforming a national organization, but it doesn’t seem to have happened yet.

Nice to see a voter fraud organization go down in flames. Wonder if Obama will try to give them a bailout.

Matthew Vadum says to watch out for them to reform under new names.

Some voters in Boulder City [Nevada] complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County’s electronic voting machines.

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid’s name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn’t alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

“Something’s not right,” Ferrara said. “One person that’s a fluke. Two, that’s strange. But several within a five minute period of time — that’s wrong.”

How’s this for wrong:

A Craven County [North Carolina] voter says he had a near miss at the polls on Thursday when an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended.

Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.

“They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,” Laughinghouse said. “That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.”

It’s not enough to beat Democrats. You have to beat them by the margin of fraud, which gets increasingly wide the more brazen the party becomes in its corruption. Democrats are the party of taking by force and trickery what others have earned. That applies not only to money but to votes.

On tips from nancz and Anonymous. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Thanks to Jeff Dunetz at Yid With Lid we have found out that a former ACORN worker turned director of the League of Women Voters has been heard justifying actions of the debate moderator who tried to prevent the audience at an 8th District candidate debate from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance last week.

As the debate began someone in the crowd yelled out asking if they were going to start the night’s activities with the pledge. The moderator of the debate nixed the idea saying “no we are not.” Then when the crowd expressed its shock and dismay she said “excuse me,” and “it has never been part of…” at which time she was interrupted by the entire crowd reciting the pledge anyway.

For days the controversy has raged since the October 20 debate where debate moderator Kathy Tate-Bradish tried to prevent the people from reciting the pledge. Then on Oct. 22, there was an outrageous story that Executive Director Jan Czarnik of the League of Women Voters was lambasting the pledge controversy as a stunt set up by GOP candidate Joe Walsh and an example of “phony patriotism.”

So the LWV thinks reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is “phony patriotism,” eh?

Disgusting.

Now Mr. Dunetz informs us that the anti-pledge moderator, Mz Tate-Bradish, was once involved in Obama’s campaign and Exec. Dir. Czarnik once worked for ACORN’s Project Vote effort. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that these two women stand against uttering the Pledge of Allegiance at public gatherings.

Dunetz found Tate-Bradish mentioned on Obama’s Campaign website (originally called My Barack Obama, now styled as Organizing for America, the president’s campaigning website) and found evidence that Czarnik was the “project director” for Chicago’s chapter of Project Vote, a project set up and operated by the now discredited and criminal ACORN organization. (See YidWithLid)

The sad thing is that the League of Woman Voters is supposed to be non-partisan yet here we have a sold out leftist running the local candidate debates.

It is a sad day when the LWV takes a stand against patriotism and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Matthew Vadum, ever vigilant on the evils perpetrated by ACORN, reminds us that the criminal community organizer has not had its federal funding cut off permanently. The temporary cut off is soon to expire and Vadum reports that there doesn’t seem to be anyone in Congress taking up a reinstatement of the ban.

In his Sept. 28 piece at the American Spectator, Vadum says that many people are confused about the funding ban imagining it was permanent.

This confusion about ACORN can probably be blamed in part on the quirks of parliamentary procedure and the complexity of the appropriations process. The legal language prohibiting the funding is contained in spending legislation that covers only the federal government’s current fiscal year which ends this Sept. 30.

The current funding ban is due to run out soon.

So is Congress making to fix this lack of attention on ACORN?

One bill pending in Congress would extend the funding ban but it’s not going anywhere. Section 417 of the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill for fiscal 2011 (S.3644) would prohibit funding of ACORN in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, 2010. It’s very unlikely that the bill will become law by Oct. 1; in other words, despite the earlier funding ban, ACORN is alive and kicking.

The left loves stuff like this. A big show is made about bowing to public pressure and cutting off funds for things the voters dislike but as time rolls on the bans expire and Congress quietly reinstates the offending funding when they imagine no one is looking.

ACORN likely just imagines that all the money will come back and more as the few Democrats that made a big show of cutting them off return to their profligate ways once they feel the photo op time has ended.

Like Vadum says, don’t count ACORN out. It is alive and kicking.

The leftists are trying to emulate both Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement by having their own march on D.C. and it is coming in but a few days. They are claiming that “hundreds of thousands” of their extreme leftist compatriots will gather at the Lincoln Memorial on October 2 for a left-wing bacchanalia at our nation’s capitol.

They are calling it “One Nation Working Together,” and it is yet one more left-wing, extremist attempt to employ Orwellian language to name an event because, Lord knows, they don’t include the millions of conservative Americans in that “one nation” title!

Here is what they are saying of their poor attempt to emulate Beck:

On Saturday, October 2, 2010, hundreds of thousands of Americans from across the country will gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate our re-commitment to change.

The One Nation March will feature human and civil rights leaders, labor leaders, environmental and peace activists, faith leaders, celebrities and sports figures – all marching together to help Put America Back to Work and to Pull America Back Together. And to help reorder our national priorities so that investments in people come first.

It’s time to stand up and march for the change we voted for. Use the march resources below to plan and promote your trip.

Surely this will be a test of the left’s strength just ahead of this midterm election. Will they be able to get the “hundreds of thousands” that they are claiming they are going to field? Or will it be little else but thousands of union members bused to the site and paid to be there to give a false impression of a great crowd?

We’ll find out in less than a week.

So who are some of these “hundreds of thousands of Americans” that are sponsoring this left-wing riot? Along with several Big Labor unions, just about every whacked out, far fringe group is pushing this. There are communists and socialists, militant gays, race baiters, anti-war nuts, “social justice” types and Greenies of all sorts.

Here is a partial list of the fringe and extremist organizations sponsoring this event (in no particular order):

• La Raza
• Code Pink
• Communist Party USA
• Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition
• Solidarity, a socialist, feminist, anti-racist organization
• National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
• Green for All
• Queers for Economic Justice
• American Muslim Association of North America
• War Resistors League
• Rainbow Push Coalition
• Peace Action
• ANSWER (anti-war)

It is also interesting to note the unions involved in this rally. One wonders how many of the dues paying members of these unions understand that their money is going to participate with racist groups like La Raza, militant gay groups, and communists and socialists?

• AFL-CIO
• United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)
• American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
• US LAbor Against the War (AFSCME UAW, SEIU and others)
• International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT, affiliated with AFL-CIO)
• AFTRA (radio and actors union)
• Utility Workers Union
• UNITE HERE
• National Education Association (NEA)
• United Steel Workers
• Transport Workers
• Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
• … and others

I don’t know about you but I can’t wait for the mayhem that this thing will generate. And it will be very interesting to see the numbers that turn out. Likely you’ll see thousands of professionally printed signs instead of handmade ones (indicative of a lack of grassrootiness) and you’ll be presented with a sea of purple shirts, red shirts and T-Shirts sporting other union colors showing that unions are the only real source of participants here.

More interesting will be to see how the Old Media establishment cover this thing. We’ll see inflated numbers and all sorts of happy-talk coverage, for sure.

But, we’ll see, won’t we?