"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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Thanks to Wall Street Occupier Jesse LaGreca, who didn't only show up the Fox reporter sent to embarrass occupiers, but also managed to get the OWS message across on a Sunday political chat show, which is essentially unheard of. So thanks to you, for bringing up economic justice to the ancient panel of crusty establishmentarians on "Meet on Press."

Thanks to Scott Olsen, the Iraq vet and victim of brutal police overreaction at Occupy Oakland, for showing the many forms that fighting for one's country can take. We're especially thankful that he's recovering from the coma induced by a tear gas canister fired directly at his head, and is well enough to give public statements.

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Planned Parenthood, Rose’s bête-noire, is involved in the official coalition to defeat Initiative 26, which would amend Mississippi’s constitution to grant full “personhood” to fertilized eggs. Mississippi being Mississippi, the official anti-26 campaign has focused on what it calls the amendment's “unintended consequences” beyond banning abortion: criminalizing miscarriages deemed suspicious, severely limiting in-vitro fertilization and banning many popular forms of birth control.

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Viewers of the clip will see Mr. O'Keefe -- feigning the appearance of a Wall Street banker -- as he tries to converse with the hoi polloi. One protester rambles on about a "Constitutional World Federation." Another chats about Amalgamated Bank. And a third gave O'Keefe a piece of cake! What will those dastardly liberals think of next?

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O'Keefe, who has nabbed headlines with high-profile video stings against NPR, ACORN and other left-leaning targets, was arrested in 2010 for attempting to tamper with phones in the New Orleans office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu. Three years of probation were a condition of his sentence. Since then, every trip the activist takes outside of New Jersey (where he resides with his parents) has had to be cleared by a judge.

Per Talking Points Memo:

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Although Project Veritas' application for nonprofit recognition was approved in early April, the Chronicle of Philanthropy first reported the news earlier this week, after gaining access to relevant papers through the Freedom of Information Act. O'Keefe told the Chronicle:

“We’re pleased that Project Veritas’s nonprofit status has been approved. Our nonpartisan mission of exposing corruption while training new, investigative journalists can now be fully supported by donors who require a tax-exemption for their generous contributions.”

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Because of his familiarity with the rottenness of his own technique, he is apparently wary of being videotaped himself. The Asbury Park Press learned this the hard way when it attempted to trick him into saying something offensive by pretending to be a racist Tea Party leader simply videotape a speech he gave to a roomful of people.

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The Blaze compared the edited and ready-for-air video with the lengthy unedited raw video of the NPR executives talking with the pretend Muslims attempting to goad them into saying outrageous things. The analysis found numerous shady and misleading edits and elisions. The report all but absolved former NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller of saying anything all that offensive to conservative Americans. The Blaze even reveals that the "raw" video was altered and censored for reasons unknown.

The Blaze's Scott Baker concludes, "even if you are of the opinion, as I am, that undercover reporting is acceptable and ethical in very defined situations, it is another thing to approve of editing tactics that seem designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented."

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NPR general counsel Joyce Slocum is Schiller's interim replacement. Board chairman Dave Edwards said Wednesday that the board has "absolute confidence" in Slocum.

The board is establishing a transition committee to search for a new CEO. Edwards says the board will be deliberate and there's no timetable for a decision.

Schiller resigned as NPR's CEO Wednesday to limit the damage from hidden camera footage of a fellow executive deriding the tea party movement as "seriously racist." Conservatives called the video proof that the network is biased and undeserving of federal funds.

From the news organization's perspective, the timing was exceptionally bad. The battle for funds will be the toughest yet, with Republicans in the new House majority looking to cut all federal funding of public radio and television.

It's the latest blunder for the news organization, which publicly admitted fumbling the firing of analyst Juan Williams over comments he made about Muslims. Then NPR had to apologize to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords when it falsely reported the congresswoman's death.

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Yesterday James O'Keefe, the conservative trickster who has previously targeted ACORN and other organizations with fraudulent schemes aimed at exposing what he sees as liberal bias and malfeasance, unveiled his latest act: his confederates impersonated Muslim donors and recorded a meeting with an NPR fundraiser, Ron Schiller. Schiller said some impolitic things, some of which were true, others of which were overstatements, none of which was that different from what you can hear in any bar and on any blog. (Unless you believe nobody has ever charged that there are racists in the ranks of the Tea Party, or that anyone has ever suggested NPR might be better off without the federal funding that conservatives are constantly threatening to cut.)

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National Public Radio said in a statement that it was "appalled" by the comments from Ron Schiller, the president of NPR's fundraising arm and a senior vice president for development.

The video was posted Tuesday by James O'Keefe, the same activist whose undercover videos have targeted other groups opposed by conservatives, like the community organizing group ACORN and Planned Parenthood.

Schiller had planned to resign from his position before the video was shot and was expected to depart in May. In a statement Tuesday night, however, he said his resignation would be effective immediately.

The video drew swift reaction from Republicans in Congress, who are renewing efforts to cut funding to public broadcasters. NPR and PBS have long been targets of conservatives who claim their programming has a left-wing bias. Similar efforts in the 1990s and 2005 were not successful, although public broadcasters take the threat seriously.

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The website for MEAC read a lot like a right-wing cartoon version of radical Islam -- so perhaps it's not surprising that a few notoriously anti-Muslim bloggers were apparently taken in by the hoax website. (It's not clear that the NPR officials ever saw the site.)

Pamela Geller, the blogger who deserves much of the credit for starting the "ground zero mosque" controversy, seized on MEAC's website way back in January, pointing to passages on the website that promoted the bogeyman of sharia:

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O'Keefe has now orchestrated another video ambush, this time targeting National Public Radio. Two undercover O'Keefe lackeys -- posing as representatives of a supposed American affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood -- met with two NPR officials, senior executive Ron Schiller (who announced he's leaving his position last week) and Betsey Liley, director of institutional giving. They brought a hidden camera.

Schiller touched on a number of issues, including Juan Williams, Egypt and liberalism in America. In one notable exchange, Schiller and Liley remark that NPR -- which receives a percentage of its income from the government -- would be "better off in the long run without federal funding," a statement that runs counter to NPR's public position. The portion of the exchange that figures to receive the most attention, however, comes when Schiller expounds on the Tea Party:

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It didn't really work, because Planned Parenthood quickly caught on and alerted the FBI. (BigJournalism.com exclusive: Planned Parenthood alerts the authorities when confronted by self-proclaimed human traffickers!) Planned Parenthood suspected that the hoaxer had ties to Live Action, an antiabortion activist group run by Lila Rose, a sometime O'Keefe partner-in-undercover-stinging. And Live Action confirmed its involvement by posting the sad results of its exhaustive video investigation today. It caught one staffer possibly advising a make-believe pimp to send a make-believe underage prostitute somewhere where her abortion would not be reported. (It is obviously impossible to tell what actually happened without the unedited video.) (And also this Planned Parenthood alerted the authorities about the weird visit.)

These conservative undercover "hoaxes" are best understood as an attempt to make their fantasies real. In order to make animate the world that they feverishly imagine, they must themselves become the unsavory characters with bad motivations that they enjoy thinking populate these hotbeds of degenerate liberal activity.

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The difference between O'Keefe and the late Allen Funt, understand, being that Funt played it strictly for laughs. Letting the victim in on the joke was a big part of the show. "Smile," he'd say to some guy tricked into arguing with a talking mailbox, "you're on 'Candid Camera.'"

O'Keefe's stunts, however, have been aimed at humiliating his targets and exposing them to ridicule and even legal peril, which is what makes his takedown by CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau so satisfying. Poor baby, O'Keefe got caught in his own trap, which is no doubt why readers who get their information from Fox News probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

He used to be their hero. Sean Hannity once hailed O'Keefe as a "pioneer in journalism," and Bill O'Reilly wanted to nominate him for a congressional medal. There were mentions of the Pulitzer Prize. Even Glenn Beck took time out from his busy schedule of likening Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler to call O'Keefe "courageous."

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O'Keefe's defense -- posted, of course, on Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" -- rests on us believing that the prank-outlining document obtained by CNN was a draft that O'Keefe did not plan on actually following. He says ideas for stunts are sent to him all the time (like a fancy Hollywood producer!) and sometimes he approves of the idea behind a prank without endorsing everything about it.

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