“I just feel that if we don’t stand up now, it’s never going to happen,” said Tomecka Wilson, a 32-year-old who works for the seafood chain Captain D’s. “They’re making billions off of us making little to nothing. So they can afford to share a little bit more.”

Organizers expect 50 to 70 St. Louis workers to strike over the next 24 hours, including workers from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Hardee’s and Domino’s. The strike got an early start this morning, when a group of workers at a Jimmy John’s went out on strike in protest over alleged humiliation by management: They say their boss required them to wear signs stating that they worked too slowly. “It’s clearly getting national traction,” said Ed Ott, a lecturer in labor studies for the City University of New York, consultant for unions, and board member of New York Communities for Change, the group spearheading fast food organizing in the nation’s largest city. “This is potentially the largest organizing drive in decades.”

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Asked for comment on the strike, spokespeople for McDonald's and the National Restaurant Association referred Salon to their statements from yesterday. In an e-mailed statement, de Blasio said, "Fast Food Forward is fighting for solutions for working people right here and now, and it deserves the support of all New Yorkers."

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Given the professed concerns about election fraud among Virginia Republicans, it seems somewhat astonishing that the man at the center of the Commonwealth's most notorious fraud scandal last year seems to be getting off the hook after initially being charged with 13 criminal counts including eight felony charges.

Colin Small, a Republican Party voter registration supervisor who secretly tossed filled-out voter registration forms into a dumpster last year, had all of his felony charges dropped by the local Republican Commonwealth attorney prosecuting the case yesterday.

Small was arrested and charged with 13 counts -- including destruction and disclosure of voter registrations, as well as obstruction of justice -- in Harrisonburg, Va., in the run-up to the presidential election last year, after he was seen by a local shopkeeper throwing away a bag of registration forms behind his store. Small's felony charges were all dropped on Tuesday, according to local Fox affiliate WHSV.

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Last week, in a scoop by the website Wonkette, it was disclosed that O'Keefe, a federal criminal, agreed to pay $100,000 in his own legal settlement with the same former ACORN employee, after heading up the scheme to secretly videotape him in violation of California's Invasion of Privacy Act (Cal. Penal Code § 632).

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The ACORN sting was one of O'Keefe's first and most successful operations, leading to a congressional prohibition on federal funding for ACORN that caused the group to collapse. But Juan Carlos Vera, a former employee whom O'Keefe and accomplice Hannah Giles secretly filmed in a California ACORN office, said the tape violated a state law against recording someone without their permission, so he sued the two conservative sting artists.

Giles settled this summer, but the suit against O'Keefe is still in federal court.

Now, according to documents obtained by Wonkette, Vera has agreed to drop the case against O'Keefe in exchange for $100,000 and acknowledgment from O'Keefe that the video did not include the fact that Vera had called the police during the sting. The settlement, dated Wednesday, adds that O'Keefe “regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family.” He has 30 days to pay up.

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A provision in a short-term budget bill introduced by the House Appropriations Committee would cut funding to the group, which advocated for low-income families, but was stripped of all federal funding in 2009 and shut down in 2010.

The Huffington Post reports:

Nevertheless, Section 510 of the latest legislation, introduced by House Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), reads: "None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors."

Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the committee, said the line was "a typical provision that is included in most appropriations bills."

ACORN, short for the Alliance of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was a repeated target of Republicans, particularly conservative gadfly James O'Keefe. But, as Zach Carter of HuffPo writes, "Independent investigations by the California attorney general, the Massachusetts attorney general and the Brooklyn, N.Y. district attorney would later clear ACORN of criminal wrongdoing, and an investigation by the Government Accountability Office would clear ACORN of charges that it mishandled federal funds."

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The Times reports:

The Florida Division of Elections has forwarded the reports of possible fraud to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation. Prosecutors in some affected counties are also investigating. It is unclear how many forms have been forwarded, in all: in Palm Beach County, the election supervisor found 106 suspicious forms, but the number in several other counties is far lower...

... Election supervisors said they have come across forms with handwriting that did not match previous registration forms, bogus addresses and other identifiers like driver’s license numbers that appeared to be invalid. But in other cases, the forms were just incomplete, which does not constitute fraud.

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Four years later, ACORN is dead, and a Republican firm contracted by the Republican National Committee has adopted its shady tactics. But, so far at least, there’s been hardly a peep from the same conservatives who seized on ACORN about one of their own engaging in almost identical fraudulent tactics.

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But their game plan is simple. They want to discourage voters by complicating every step for new and existing voters from specific blue cohorts, such as students, poor people and minorities. They’ve adopted new laws or rules that target pathways surrounding polling place voting, while keeping voting by mail—a longtime GOP strategy—free from similar rules. And they are spreading fears that there will be vastly more policing of the process to scare away voters, when in reality that’s not likely to be the case.

While most of the GOP’s voter suppression strategies are designed to erupt in November, it is now possible to identify at least three major areas where hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic votes have already been thwarted—and where steps to reverse that process, if possible, must be taken soon before fall voter registration deadlines kick in.

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"Voter fraud" is a right-wing obsession used to justify restrictive ballot access-limiting measures that are actually designed to suppress turnout among people who tend to vote for Democrats. It does not and cannot exist in anything approaching a large enough scale to affect an election, and even isolated incidents of fraud prove difficult for right-wingers to dredge up to prove that their concerns have merit. Dozens of people have spent years tirelessly attempting to prove that organized "voter fraud" is a real thing and all they have ever managed to prove is that sometimes lazy volunteers make fake registration forms, sometimes former felons mistakenly vote despite being disenfranchised, and sometimes people double-vote. There is nothing remotely resembling coordinated voter fraud, carried out with the intention of stealing an election, taking place anywhere in the United States. Those who sincerely believe that there is are deluded, though most of the people who constantly crow about it don't sincerely believe in it; they just want to make it harder for blacks and Latinos and poor people to vote.

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Polls show Republican Bob Turner slightly leading, so obviously any result other than a Turner victory means ACORN paid homeless people to vote 100 times under false names. "Will [close polls] tempt some locals to resort to the kind of voter fraud that Kings County and Brooklyn are infamous for?" asks former Fulton County, Georgia Republican Party head Hans A. von Spakovsky, who is apparently unaware that "Kings County and Brooklyn" is redundant.

Spakovsky suspects imminent voter fraud because some people listed on the registration rolls have moved or died:

A source within the Turner camp tells me the campaign sent a letter and campaign literature to all the voters on the permanent list maintained by the Board of Elections who are automatically mailed absentee ballots. They have received hundreds of pieces of returned mail marked “address unknown” or “return to sender” and at least five marked “deceased.”

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The piece is published at the hilariously named "American Thinker" site, because Vadum is too dimwitted even for the Examiner or a Breitbart site or the Washington Times or Human Events or any of the other homes of the conservative movement's lesser talents.

Here is your pull quote:

Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

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No doubt "Battle for Brooklyn" will be of most interest to New Yorkers, and particularly to people who live or work in the city's most populous borough. But the film's basic situation -- local residents and community activists vs. the development schemes of major politicians and big business -- is an archetypal element of urban life, one that can be found in almost any city, large or small, from Maine to California. What distinguished kazillionaire developer Bruce Ratner's plan to remake the center of "America's fourth-largest city" (to borrow the boosterish phrase of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz) was primarily its size and audacity, along with the fact that the ensuing battle turned very ugly and inevitably attracted the attention of the national media, much of which is headquartered a few miles away across the East River.

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The New York Times has one of those stories that doesn't actually say anything about how Breitbart is desperately seeking legitimacy and validation from the MSM that he has also supposedly dedicated his career to overthrowing. Breitbart had a sit-down with Matt Lauer this morning to explain that he feels sorry for Weiner but still might release the really dirty picture. "Breitbart boosts cred with Weiner confession," CBS reports. I realize the objective press doesn't see it this way, but one shouldn't win and lose "credibility points" like chips at a blackjack table. One is credible if one is credible, and the fact that an unreliable source is sometimes correct doesn't make that source suddenly trustworthy.

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California Rep. Darrell Issa (EYE'-suh) says Holder is hurting the Obama administration because the Justice Department isn't doing more to investigate several issues.

Issa -- who's set to lead the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee -- says the department hasn't done enough concerning the activities of the now-defunct community group ACORN, as well as a 2008 incident of alleged voter intimidation in Philadelphia involving the New Black Panther Party and those behind the WikiLeaks releases.

Issa tells "Fox News Sunday" that Holder should either stop hurting the administration or leave it.

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The Bush administration dedicated itself to fighting this imaginary menace of voter fraud, either because conservatives have deluded themselves into believing it a legitimate problem or just to, again, throw minorities off voter rolls. But in five years they managed 86 convictions, some of which were accidents and all of which were incredibly small-scale.

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Real justice, as I suspect Sherrod would agree, also requires due process for Andrew Breitbart, the Internet impresario who framed her on his Big Government website. In these circumstances, that means a fair, thorough and tough examination of the media fraud that launched his operation last year: the ACORN tapes, whose misuse by Breitbart closely parallels his behavior in the Sherrod affair.

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Today a big Breitbart "scoop" blew up in his angry face, when it was shown that the Big Journalism proprietor selectively edited a clip of an African-American USDA official seeming to admit she treated a white farmer poorly out of her own racial bias. It turns out that Shirley Sherrod was actually telling the story to show how the issue of race often obscures the issue of class, and the fact that poor black farmers and poor white farmers had a lot in common (eventually, she helped and became close to the white farmer and his family) — but Breitbart left all of that out of the video (just as he selectively and unfairly edited his cartoonish ACORN tapes).

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Filed  last week in the U.S. District Court in San Diego, Vera’s brief complaint claims that O’Keefe, Giles and up to 20 unnamed parties violated his "reasonable expectation of privacy" by conspiring to secretly videotape him and then posting the tapes on the Internet without his consent, causing him to lose his job and other damages. Indeed, as the complaint notes, the "pimp and prostitute" explicitly asked Vera whether their conversation would be confidential.

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