Completely innocent right-wing operatives cop a guilty plea:
The four defendants who were arrested in January in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs federal complex in New Orleans pleaded guilty Wednesday morning in federal court to entering real property belonging to the United States under false pretenses.
Magistrate Judge Daniel Knowles III sentenced Stan Dai, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan each to two years probation, a fine of $1,500 and 75 hours of community service during their first year of probation.
James O’Keefe, as leader of the group and famous for posing as a pimp in ACORN office videos, received three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service.
I suppose it is a good thing they did not receive any jail time, because I don’t think I could have handled six months of “Free the Landrieu Four” posts clogging the blogosphere. Having said that, is it entirely too much to ask that O’Keefe be required to serve his community service under the watchful eyes of the New Orleans branch of ACORN? Pretty please?
Bonus points if he serves it dressed as a pimp.
ChrisS
Was he ever even dressed as a pimp in the acorn offices?
raff
“Community service”? Man, you thought these guys hated community organizers before; now they have to work for them! Suck it, O’Keefe.
John Cole
@ChrisS: Excellent idea.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Instead you’ll get six more days of ACTIVIST JUDGES! because Knowles should have rejected their guilty pleas, given them lollipops and let them go. And their attorneys are incompetent liberal thugs. Also2.
Dave
It might be too much to ask that O’Keefe serve under ACORN–aren’t they defunct?
PurpleGirl
I think working for ACORN is an excellent idea. Karma stings, get used to it.
PurpleGirl
@Dave: They are still very much alive but concentrating it seems on the local groups.
http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=12340
Tom Hilton
Is that a felony conviction? Does O’Keefe lose his vote?
Violet
So long as they spend their time doing fun stuff like cleaning toilets, picking up trash, and other assorted real jobs, I’ll be happy. Bonus points if they have to do their community service outside during daylight hours over the summer in New Orleans. Heat and humidity will only enhance the experience.
angler
OH BOY! I found another firebagger! It’s Harry Shearer, on Olberman disrespectin’. Go get him. git git!
Yah, it’s a different thread but firebagging, it cannot wait to be exposed.
Once you get into this game, it’s fun! like Where’s Waldo. We’re all firebagger douchebagger bagger-Vance bagger hunters now.
Brian J
I wonder what Breitbart’s reaction is going to be.
On a similar note, has everyone read the profile of him in The New Yorker? He comes across as even more of a demented little turd than I imagined–and not, as some might think, because the magazine is writing against him. Maybe it’s me, but the author of the article seems to bend over backwards to try to be as objective as possible.
Anyway, I think this one quote, in the paragraph below, where he talks about style over substance, says it all:
John Cole
@angler: Drinking?
Church Lady
Maybe he can do community service right next to Bertha Lewis. She was just arrested for disorderly conduct at an immigration rally in New York.
maus
@Brian J:
His twitter’s exploding with grandeur about how he pulled off Obamagate and taking down liberals and blah blah history will absolve me.
Scott
Someone else will pay O’Keefe’s fine, he’ll likely skip all but the first weekend or two of community service, and he’ll be right back to swilling cheap beer with his buddies and planning bombing runs on congressional offices. And he’ll always have a place on Fox News.
soonergrunt
Likely that O’Keefe took reduced charges in exchange for something like the skinny on Breitbart.
WereBear
Actually, we now know: No.
I’d like to see as big a fuss made over that. But yes, working outside in LA summer, and performing community service with some people with everything stacked against them: it could be his Summer of My Dead Horse for James O’Keefe.
But, honestly; probably not.
Mnemosyne
They’ll figure out a way to make an internship at the Heritage Foundation count as community service.
Joseph Nobles
Send these assholes to a Louisiana beach to rake oil out of the beaches.
gbear
Hey O’Keefe, good luck with the ‘Have you ever been convicted of a crime’ part of your job interviews for the rest of your life.
TR
Six months? That skinny little shit wouldn’t have lasted six hours in prison.
TR
@Joseph Nobles:
Not rake. Eat.
Asshole
Just because no one was actually incarcerated doesn’t mean I can’t call for freeing the Landrieu Four anyway.
Corner Stone
@gbear: He served his purpose re: ACORN.
From here on out it’s wingnut welfare all the way down.
I smell a Regnery book or two.
Just Some Fuckhead
This is the worst punishment they could have received: helping other people, contributing to society with no possible chance of personal gain.
jenniebee
Why would you wish that on ACORN? They’re good people and have enough to do without having to deal with his attitude for 100 hours.
WereBear
From Pimp to Prisoner to Pundit: The James O’Keefe Story
Up from Mild Adversity
Tropic of Hapless Porn
Citizen_X
@Corner Stone: Absolutely. After serving his “sentence,” he will never suffer for this. What, like regular people? Pfft!
O’Keefe is a made man in the Wingnutosphere now.
gbear
@Corner Stone:
Yes, that’s true. It also means that he’s going to reach middle age having spent his life as a wingnut toadie. I foresee a future of painful divorce and alchoholism…
gbear
@WereBear:
Goodtime Jimmy’s Got The Blues
asiangrrlMN
@gbear: Don’t forget a rentboy to help carriage his luggage.
@TR: Seconded. Eat hard.
WereBear
@gbear: Well, after the:
Perhaps he has ambitions to do a Full Limbaugh:
Paranoic Fear and Self Loathing in the Dominican Republic
Decorating Dorian Gray… or Wax On, Wax Off
I Crush the Dreams of Youth… How You Can Too!
JGabriel
John Cole:
I think O’Keefe’s community service should be answering phones for Landrieu’s office, no air-conditioning, with all calls recorded. Any smart-ass remarks, or rudeness, or giving callers the impression that he is anything other than a Democrat, and he goes to jail for breaking probation.
.
Mike Kay
@angler: I agree. Firebaggers should be stamped out. That reminds me of the proverb: what do you call a 100 firebaggers chained together at the bottom of the ocean – a good start.
TDE
He should have to spend his time refurbishing blighted homes in any poor urban area of the country.
Just Some Fuckhead
James And The Giant Acorn
Corner Stone
@WereBear: I was thinking:
Played: How Obama Pimped Out the Nation
or
Black Oil/Black Heart: The story of how Obama used ACORN to destroy the Gulf of Mexico
Corner Stone
@gbear:
Well, absent the wingnut part…
asiangrrlMN
@Just Some Fuckhead: That cracked me the fuck up. Thanks!
trollhattan
That pasty little shit will probably be a “featured speaker” on the next National Review money-making cruise. It would be a shame if he were missing when they arrive at port.
EJ
@Tom Hilton: They basically plead guilty to trespassing – hardly a felony.
Anne Laurie
@soonergrunt:
From your keyboard to the FSM’s noodly hearing-apparatus. Be nice if the lawyers actually followed the money and exposed the pallid writing insects lurking under those rocks!
salacious crumb
damn i really wish that at least did prison time. he would have become someones prison bitch and would have been really pimped out
slag
So, has the GOP improved since Watergate or not? I honestly can’t decide.
El Cid
@slag: Their lesson from Watergate was that they were horribly wronged, and in no small part because of the ‘librul medja’, which they went on a 40 years war against.
handy
this basketball game is brutal way to go refs.
blueintheface
If guessing some dumbass’s email yahoo password is Watergate, I wonder what Palin thinks about a bunch of Republicans secretly trying to bug the offices of Democratic officials.
And does anyone want to take a guess as to how much David Kernell is going to get? I’ll bet it’s more than a $1500 fine and a couple of trips to the probation officer a month until he gets a cushy think tank job.
slag
@El Cid: Soooo…that would be a no, then.
Redshift
@Tom Hilton:
Sadly, the plea bargain means it was reduced to a misdemeanor.
And in looking that up, I stumbled across some of the current wingnut reaction, ugh. Apparently this is a great victory, and they’re sure the charges were reduced to avoid something embarrassing that would have come out about Landrieu through discovery if they had gone to trial.
Which is pretty funny when you think about it, because:
a) Since when does discovery in your trial for illegal entry and phone tampering allow you to dig up dirt on the victim? and,
b) If it did, wouldn’t a real conservative hero investigative journalist have risked going to trial in order to make his “investigation” a success?
Wimps.
tkogrumpy
@TDE: Refurbishing blighted homes requires talent and experience.
Michael G
Community service? Ha!
I’m sure the guy claims that every crooked republican scam he does *is already* community service. I’m sure he’s going to spend his 100 hours doing something like harassing illegal immigrants.
Bella Q
@JGabriel:
This would be exactly an appropriate punishment, given that some of my preferred options are unavailable. The Eighth Amendment can be really confining when you’re pissed off at a convicted defendant. Sigh.
Mark S.
I prefer to think of it as performance art:
It doesn’t make much more sense in context.
Joseph Nobles
Seeing some rumors out there that the top kill may have worked – YMMV.
WereBear
@Joseph Nobles: Isn’t it too soon to tell? Don’t jinx us, man!
someguy
I was hoping for hard time, at least 5-10 years. This fucking blows. They deserved a bunch of years of being made into pretty little prison wives and a short life lived in fear of being shanked for what they did. Assholes.
Yutsano
@Mark S.: Sigh. Again more obsession with teh ghey. Drives me nuts the number of closet cases who are conservatives. Just fucking fess up and be happy.
shell goddamnit
Instead of sticking Mr Pimp in urban areas with potentially minority populations I would prefer that he be assigned to rural white poor folk. So they can get a good look at each other, among other things.
shell goddamnit
I think his community service should be spent amongst the rural, white poor. So they can get a good look at one another.
Kobie
Shocking that the only community service James O’Keefe will ever do is court-ordered.
Martin
I say give these guys ShamWow suits and frog march them into Gulf until it’s like Evian out there.
Joseph Nobles
Another OT: I think a lot of people would like this rant from NanceGreggs over at DU:
Yutsano
@Martin: I am in full agreement with your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. In all seriousness, O’Keefe had better either do something productive relating to the oil spill or go clean South of I-10’s house until all the hours are fulfilled.
@Joseph Nobles: That whole column is some beautiful snark-fu right there. I bet there’s a ton of firebaggers who were in total agreement right until the last couple of paragraphs where she reveals the spoof. Teh awesomeness, it tingles.
Joseph Nobles
OK, a Reuters story on the don’t-jinx-it maybe-plugged oil leak. It appears to be only mud coming out right now. If they are successful in this stage, the flow of mud will stop. And then they can pump cement in to cap it. And then the relief wells down the road will be the icing on the cake. Fingers crossed.
Martin
@Joseph Nobles: If they cement it, they’ll stop drilling on the relief wells – won’t be needed – they’d just be drilling into cement.
Mark S.
OT: As everyone knows, triceratops was the greatest dinosaur of all time. So it was cool to learn that they found a dwarf species of it in Hungary.
soonergrunt
@Redshift:
Funny enough, they actually do think this way. The upcomming General Court-Martial of an Army LTC by the name of Lakin is providing them with all sorts of fapping fodder.
Lakin is a birther, and has refused to deploy to Afghanistan on the grounds that Obama cannot be the legitimate Commander in Chief, and therefore cannot give a lawful deployment order.
The birthers are salivating at the prospect of getting to subpoena records from the President for the defense. When they get told that courts-martial don’t work that way and that there’s ample settled military law on this and Lakin is going down like the prison bitch he’s about to become, they don’t deal well.
http:\\www.caaflog.com is a blog by military lawyers about military appellate practice, and they’re covering the Lakin issue pretty extensively. The birthers have invaded this relatively quiet little blog about an esoteric topic.
Wackyness ensues. Good times.
soonergrunt
@Kobie: This is snark, right? Because that’s not particularly shocking.
someguy
@Joseph Nobles:
Um, it’d help if he did anything progressive actually. It’s been 18 months. HCR is a corporate welfare bill, there’s no cap & trade and almost nothing with alternative energy, we’re doing more offshore drilling and ramping up in Afghanistan instead of getting out (a decision Obama made which we can’t pin on Bush) and the tax code still isn’t any more progressive than it was when he took office, despite large Democratic majorities in both houses. We’re still in Iraq, Gitmo is open, and we’re still eavesdropping on people’s phone calls.
Oh yeah, he’s been a rollicking success for liberals. Bill Clinton may have been the “first black president” but based on his third way moderation, Obama is the First Black Bill Clinton.
kay
@Joseph Nobles:
I heard a Rice engineer yesterday who said what you’re seeing is a good sign. I just decided to bank on him, rather than the punditry. Call me crazy. He also said we’d know relatively quickly if top kill was a massive failure, so the time that has elapsed alone is a hopeful thing.
The engineer was squeezed in for 2 minutes in between the wall-to-wall coverage of noted oil spill expert, James Carville.
Paul L.
WATERGATE JR. !!!!!!!1111!!!!!!
Judge Orders Potentially Exculpatory Evidence in O’Keefe Case to Be Destroyed
kay
@Paul L.:
Paul, the judge probably didn’t return the illegally obtained footage to O’Keefe because it was illegally obtained.
He was trespassing.
A fact that O’Keefe admitted when he entered the plea.
Harsh, I know, but judges can hardly be handing back ill-gotten gains to admitted crooks.
kay
@Paul L.:
You don’t get the stolen goods back after you admit the theft, either.
Judges are really, really mean.
kay
@Paul L.:
Thanks for the link though. I’m having a difficult day, and the comments are absolutely hysterical:
Keep ’em coming.
QuaintIrene
Is there any hints of drug or alcohol abuse? He could go on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.
Mitch Donahue
Sorry. ACORN no longer in New Orleans. The Republicans have done their work well.
Kobie
@soonergrunt: But of course.
scarshapedstar
Actually, I think part of his sentence ought to be a public service announcement that he DIDN’T DRESS AS A PIMP AND THE VIDEOS WERE DOCTORED.
Nancy Irving
They will probably do their community svc as interns at the Heritage Foundation.