Archive for the ‘Hannah Giles’ Category
It’s the Saul Alinsky Comedy Show!
Posted by John T. Simpson in ACORN, Hannah Giles on September 25th, 2009
“The only way to upset the power structure in your communities is to goad them, confuse them, irritate them and, most of all, make them live by their own rules. If you make them live by their own rules, you destroy them. And never forget that ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Comedy is our friend. Throw the kitchen sink at them!” – from Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radical Comedians.”
Alinsky
I never really had any insight into the pure comic genius of Saul Alinsky until I saw his new age Method followers display their considerable chops on the national stage. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, the Master’s ostentatious and envelope-pushing Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner-like proteges, whose hilarious ACORN skits also showed brilliant flashes of the late great Allen Funt. The Mysterious Mister X, the L.A. street comic who “Alinskyed” Faris Alkhateeb’s boredom-fueled Obama Joker art into an urban poster as devilishly humorous as Hannibal Lecter, also made as big a national splash as a 300-pound chub doing a cannonball into a crowded public kiddie pool.
Now I see the funny side. In fact, I’m getting Alinsky-inspired comic epiphanies of my own now. Who can say that deep down, that pathetic weepy drama queen performance by Nancy Pelosi on national TV pleading for people to “just stop it!” wasn’t the old Alinsky talking? Unfortunately for Madame Speaker, I’ve got the new age mischievous spirit of Saul Alinsky tugging at my muse. Struck me right away: the Pelosi video from 2006 in which Madame Speaker, addressing a moonbat rally, called Lefty anti-war protesters “patriots” and praised disruptions of town halls as a public service.
Eureka! What a side-by-side video comedy skit that would make! First cheering on the mad Lefty crowd like Ernst Roem rallying the Brownshirts, then all mournful like Vivien Leigh at the end of Gone With The Wind. Frankly, Madame Speaker, not only do I not give a damn, I’m going to hoist you on your own goddamn Saul Alinsky petard! Just like the Master would have wanted me to.
Another Alinsky-inspired banana peel laff riot might be editing videos of any Pelosi-like liberal Democrat Congressional reps who tearfully pleaded for support of the massive ObamaCare and Cap-and-Tax bills, then joked about not reading them. Getting the Alinsky hang of it now, people? Saul Alinsky was a comedic poet, and we didn’t even know it. Who’d a-thunk it, except perhaps those who knew him best? You know, I’ll bet if you canvassed his old neighborhoods in Chicago and Carmel, it would be just like the SNL interviews of neighbors who knew Buckwheat’s assassin:
REPORTER: “Did you know Mister Alinsky was a news-making community organizer?”
NEIGHBOR: “Yes. Very nice man.”
REPORTER: “Ever think he’d become the world’s most subversive political comedian?”
NEIGHBOR: “Oh, sure. That’s all he ever talked about.”
Here’s where I need your Alinsky-like help, my fellow mischievous political terrorist comedians, which we Americans all are at heart. Fight The Power! We The People are all in this together. I’m a comedy writer, mostly. My own brand of Alinsky humor is subversion with words. Don’t know the first fucking thing about making videos. That’s the director’s job, at least until I can take that two-day crash course that greatly helped Tarantino, Rodroguez and Chris Nolan, okay?
Doesn’t help me now. So would some helpful street comedians please throw those sharply contrasting Pelosi and other damning LibDem Lefty videos together in Alinsky-like subversively comic fashion? You can even edit in the videos where Madame Speaker first screams to the skies about CIA lies, then fumbles and stumbles on the air for five minutes trying to remember her own. Make a whole skit out of it. Scenes with biased reporters getting “Alinskyed” when they preach about objectivity write themselves. And it will all be classic Saul Alinksy and SNL-style comedy fun, fun, fun!
I am finding more and more that the Alinsky Method of comedy is manic brilliance. As sophisticated and erudite as Tracy and Hepburn, yet as moronically slapstick as the Three Stooges. And that is the sheer Wile E. Coyote genius of the Alinsky Method. Turn the whole show on its head for all sides. It is as insidiously and comically brilliant as the wave of professional hit men sent to the Oktoberfest in Munich to assassinate Inspector Clouseau, then wound up killing each other off to the last man.
For forty years the American Left has been having all the fun adhering to the Alinsky Method. Even drove its most charismatic protege into the White House, and his fellow Alinskyites to near-absolute power in Congress. Sans humor, but what do want from the Left? Yet the blackly comic Alinsky Method of today may yet drive that same humorless old school Alinsky army to Exit Stage Left faster than you can say “ACORN!” And that is the sheer subversive comic ingenuity of the Great Mr. Alinsky.
I know that wherever he is today (and I really hope it’s Heaven, he deserves it), the great Saul Alinsky is smiling down on the absurdity of it all. He must have been rolling on the streets of gold when he saw that first Pimp and Ho video, at least as much as when he saw Eddie Murphy’s White Like Me skit. Life Is Beautiful, and so is Saul Alinsky. May he forever Rest in Peace. At least during the times he isn’t falling to pieces over the ACORN videos, and glowing in the realization that it is all his fault.
Alinsky seminar over. Here’s your reading assignment: the Master’s Playboy interview. Let’s get busy, people! Oh, and if want a tagline for my recommended Pelosi comedy montage, my pick is PELOSI LIES, THE CIA AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH DIES! It’s all in how you pitch it, folks. I would also recommend as a great source of material the Alinksy-like pics and videos of Lefty protests in the past, for both side-by-sides and slogans of our own. Just like the Viet Cong scavenged our unexploded bombs to use against us, but much better. It’s all in fun, and nobody loses an eye.
God Bless You Mr. Alinsky, wherever you are. Wiseass punk! Ledger’s Joker ain’t got nothin’ on you!
ACORN Internal Investigator’s Website Downplays Scandal, Attacks Messengers
Posted by Publius in ACORN, Hannah Giles, Obama, Politics on September 24th, 2009
From Center for American Progress:
John Podesta, Obama transition team co-chair and President of Center for American Progress (the group helped launch Media Matters in 2004). Podesta is a member of the ACORN Advisory Council.
…Hysterical Fox News commentators have blown this story up like a hot air balloon, and much of the rest of the media appear to believe that what Fox says goes. Andrew Alexander complains that “traditional news outlets like The Post simply don’t pay enough attention to conservative media or viewpoints.” But writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Rick Perlstein responds: “Why would a newspaper like the The Post be training its investigative focus on ACORN now? Whether you think ill or well of ACORN, they’re a very marginal group in the grand scheme of things and about as tied to the White House as the PTA.”
This right-wing stunt proved such powerful catnip to mainstream media bigfeet that amazingly, George Stephanopoulos thought it worth discussing with the President of the United States during a rare one-on-one interview opportunity. The president quite understandably explained that that he wasn’t following the story very closely, and that the country was dealing with more serious problems right now. (U.S. grants to ACORN, already suspended, account for literally 52 seconds of annual U.S. government spending, according to one careful estimate.) Stephanopoulos had nothing else to say. As though he were correcting himself, he continued, “Afghanistan is a serious problem facing the country right now.” Oh, yeah, Afghanistan….
To be fair, outside of nakedly ideological outfits, most of the reporters in the mainstream media behaved responsibly when the tapes emerged on right-wing radio shows and blogs. The tapes didn’t become legitimately newsworthy until the Census Bureau dropped ACORN from its efforts to collect 2010 census data. Initial reports even left out mention of the videotapes. But the videos are what attract media, particularly television, to this story, not government action against ACORN. Census and congressional moves to dissociate government from ACORN have become excuses to show these tapes again and again. News outlets have used these tapes even though they meet no reasonable journalistic standards.
The press has taken the release of the tapes as an opportunity to rehash the same handful of connections to ACORN that have been discussed and exaggerated ad nauseum by the openly conservative punditocracy. The Associated Press ran a piece by Sharon Theimer and Pete Yost on September 20 whose title asks, “Did ACORN Get Too Big for its Own Good?” The reporters give a history of the organization, focusing on any bad press the company has received since it began in 1970. They also refer to Barack Obama’s “long” relationship with the group. They illuminate three connections between the president and ACORN, including an endorsement by Bertha Lewis, the CEO. In addition to its being nonsense, these arguments assume that the videotapes signal a systemic failure on the part of ACORN, which has been neither investigated nor proven…
Read full article here.
Breitbart Uses Netroots Tricks to Take Down ACORN
Posted by Big Hollywood in ACORN, Hannah Giles on September 24th, 2009
From The Washington Independent:
On September 10, Andrew Breitbart launched his new site, BigGovernment, with hidden-video camera footage of two young conservative activists who’d gotten Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) employees to advise them on hiding prostitution profits from the IRS. Within hours, Breitbart was doing interviews with reporters who wanted to know how, exactly, the story had come about, and why Big Government was releasing the videos and the identity of the muckrackers — 25-year-old James O’Keefe III and 20-year-old Hannah Giles — so slowly.
“It was strategized,” Breitbart told TWI this week, so “that they would be deprived of the type of information that a defense attorney would try to gather in order to create a defense.”
Who were “these people?” They were not just the leaders or members of ACORN itself. “They” were the Democratic Party, the White House, the progressive Center for American Progress and its president John Podesta. The “Democrat-media complex” is Breitbart’s name for the whole apparatus. “We deprived them of information,” Breitbart explained, “so that they couldn’t come up with a vile, kill-the-messenger attack with the media doing the groundwork for them.”
The success of Breitbart’s strategy was immediate, stunning, and is still ricocheting around the political world. Five days after the story broke, the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 to prevent ACORN from receiving any federal funding. Two days later, the House of Representatives did the same. Meanwhile, Breitbart was talking to more reporters, amused at how the “kill-the-messenger attack” was playing out. When one report from The Washington Post called him for a story about O’Keefe and Giles, Breitbart compared their tape to the photos of Abu Ghraib prison released in April 2004. (more…)
Slate: Two Cheers for Andrew Breitbart
Posted by Publius in ACORN, Hannah Giles, michael moore on September 23rd, 2009
Sometimes it takes an outsider to show the press corps the way.
By Jack Shafer
Among the many glorious things about American journalism is that no credentialing organization or regulatory body stands between an individual who wants to break a story and his public reporting of it.
In the old days, one significant barrier did deter aspiring reporters: If they couldn’t find a publisher for their piece or afford to self-publish, they were SOL. But now, thanks to the free-for-all environment created by the Web, those publication and distribution worries have evaporated. Anybody can be a journalist in the new regime, we’re told, and on some days, it seems as if everybody is.
Last week, thanks to the sponsorship of Andrew Breitbart’s new site BigGovernment.com, self-described activist filmmaker James O’Keefe, 25, and his colleague Hannah Giles, 20, brought national scrutiny to the progressive Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, with a series of guerilla videos that are one part 60 Minutes, two parts Punk’d, three parts Ali G, and four parts Michael Moore, all bubbling under a whipped topping of yellow journalism.
If you’re late to the story, Andrew Breitbart is a conservative author, columnist, Web entrepreneur, and Matt Drudge protégé. Lately, he has distributed a series of videos made by O’Keefe and Giles in which the duo visits various ACORN offices with a hidden camera, pretending to be a pimp and prostitute seeking advice on setting up a brothel. ACORN workers in Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; San Diego; San Bernardino, Calif; and Brooklyn, N.Y., took the bait, and now ACORN is on the run, firing underlings, making excuses, and responding to charges of mismanagement and fraud. On Capitol Hill, Congress is getting ready to defund the organization, which has taken in at least $53 million in federal money since 1994.
Read the full article here.
AP: How the ACORN Videos Came To Be
Posted by Publius in ACORN, Hannah Giles, News on September 23rd, 2009
From the Associated Press:
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Much of America discovered James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles through their hidden-camera, make-believe pimp and prostitute videos of ACORN employees giving advice about establishing a brothel with underage hookers.
But as far back as 2006—well before the videos became a national sensation and conservative rallying cry—the fresh-faced O’Keefe and Giles connected with a pair of Washington conservative institutions that boast programs training ideological journalists.
Now, due to coordinated promotion of the undercover sting footage by influential players in the conservative media, Giles and O’Keefe have gone from part of the pack to movement superstars.
Giles, a 20-year-old sophomore at Florida International University, spent the summer on a $1,200-a-month internship with the National Journalism Center, a training organization whose alumni include conservative commentator Ann Coulter. Immediately after graduating Rutgers University in 2006, O’Keefe, 25, was paid to set up magazines and newspapers on university campuses for the Leadership Institute, which recruits potential conservative public policy and media stars.
Each has other credentials that place them squarely in the network of activists who believe liberal-leaning mainstream media willfully ignore stories that illustrate the failings of the political left and its leaders.
O’Keefe and Giles insist that no one helped them conceive, execute or finance their video project, which with remarkable speed has devastated the activist community service group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, commonly known as ACORN.
They have said a shoestring $1,300 budget was all it took to shoot video in at least five ACORN offices.
Read the full story here.
**BREAKING** ACORN Sues Hidden-Camera Filmmakers, Breitbart.com
Posted by Publius in ACORN, Hannah Giles, News on September 23rd, 2009
From the Associated Press:
BALTIMORE (AP) – Community activist group ACORN is suing the makers of a hidden-camera video that showed employees of its Baltimore office giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman posing as a prostitute.
The liberal group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.
The two employees seen in the video were fired after it was posted online. The lawsuit says the employees, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams, suffered “extreme emotional distress.”
Read the full article here.
Planting the Seeds: The Politicized Art Behind the ACORN Plan
Posted by Andrew Breitbart in ACORN, Featured Story, Hannah Giles, News, Politics, Van Jones on September 20th, 2009
Everything you needed to know about the unorthodox roll out of the now-notorious ACORN sting videos was hidden in plain sight in my Sept. 7 column, “Katie Couric, Look in the Mirror.” ACORN was not the only target of those videos; so were Katie, Brian, Charlie and every other mainstream media pooh-bah.
They were not going to report this blockbuster unless they were forced to. And they were. What’s more, it ain’t over yet. Not every hint I dropped in that piece about what was to come has played itself out yet.Stay tuned.
When filmmaker and provocateur James O’Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN – the nation’s foremost “community organizers” – dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for – and getting – help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice. In the past, Mr. O’Keefe created brilliant social satire that rocked his college campus and even made its way on to the talk-radio and cable-news shows, but the magnitude of his latest adventure had the potential to rock the political establishment.
I was awed by Mr. O’Keefe’s guts and amazed by the footage, but explained that the mainstream media would try to kill this important and illuminating expose about a corrupt and criminal political racket, and that the well-funded political left would go into “war room” mode, with 25-year-old Mr. O’Keefe and 20-year-old cohort Miss Giles in the cross hairs. I felt I had a moral obligation to protect these young muckrakers from the left and from the media, and to devise a strategy that would force the media’s hand. (more…)