Avoiding Eternal Damnation Like His Buddy Breitbart

$100K: the price of being a douchebag

Faux journalist and conservative hitman James O’Keefe has just agreed to a $100,000 settlement to avoid going to court over his phony reporting of ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera. According to the deal, O’Keefe has also agreed to an 11-word apology, that sources are calling “insincere.”

ACORN was a community organizing group that became the focus of conservatives  in the build-up to the 2008 presidential election.  ACORN was responsible for highly successful voting drives of minority and low-income voters, who are demographically likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates.  ACORN’s decades-long campaigns to raise the minimum wage and their battles against predatory lenders had unfortunately invited the animus of powerful business interests—who funded the media activities of conservative bloggers and phony journalists like O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart. 

In 2009, James O’Keefe and his associate Hannah Giles, hoped to discredit ACORN by filming Juan Carlos Vera of the National office of ACORN without his consent (and thus violating section 632 of the California penal code in the process).  Vera sued O'Keefe over this and the wild misrepresentation of his activities that resulted from a heavily edited version of the undercover video that was posted online and promulgated to conservative media by O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart.