Union front groups We Are Ohio (WAO) and Progress Ohio are currently promoting a “no” vote on Issue 2, which is a referendum on Ohio’s Senate Bill 5, to be held on Election Day 2011 (November 8). SB 5 requires public employees to contribute a modest amount more towards their benefits, to close the gap somewhat with their private sector counterparts.

In attempting to defeat SB 5, union advocates have loudly trumpeted a study by Rutgers Professor Jeffrey Keefe that claims that public employees already earn less private sector workers do in comparable jobs.

For instance, Jeff Bell of Columbus Business First reported that when inquiring about public employees’ superior pay and benefits, WAO spokeswoman Melissa Fazekas “quickly steered [him] to a study on the compensation issue completed this year by Jeffrey Keefe.”

However, Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation and Andrew Biggs (no relation to Jax) of the American Enterprise Institute have found Keefe’s study to be, in Biggs’ words, “a piece of junk.”

In their own September 14th study, Richwine and Biggs conclude that while public employees receive 2.5 percent less in wages than their private counterparts, “when pay and benefits are taken into consideration public workers received 31.2 percent more in total compensation.” When other factors are taken into account, such as job security, “Ohio public-sector workers are paid 43.4percent more.” Richwine and Biggs conclude that under SB 5, public employees would still maintain this edge over private sector workers.

Keefe also works for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington, DC think tank that boasts that it is “beholden to no one; we say what we think is true regardless of who might not want to hear it.” The EPI also claims that it “conducts research according to the rigorous standards of objectivity,” and “provides data … that allows for a clear, unbiased understanding of the economy’s effect on the living standards of working Americans.”

James and I had an agent at Project Veritas contact Keefe, posing as “Chris Fowler,” a researcher for a hedge fund manager who had chosen to work alongside the Ohio Education Association. “Fowler” offered Keefe a commission in exchange for authoring a study showing that cuts to education and collective bargaining “rights” hurt students, emphasizing that “if [EPI] find[s] evidence contrary to what our intended outcome is, we just, we want to make sure that they will omit that kind of data,” to which Keefe responded reassuringly, “Oh, what they’ll do, is they’ll not publish it … We’re not going to change the results of any study, but if it’s something you don’t want published, we’ll kill it.”

Shortly thereafter, I approached Keefe at a public symposium on SB 5 at the University of Toledo. I offered him an opportunity to defend his standards of objectivity, and, subsequently, to explain the phone call.

Keefe began by assuring that he had not and “never would” accept what I described as a “pay for play deal in which [he would] agree to kill any research that didn’t support a pro-union conclusion,” explaining that it was “the interviewer [who] said that” [emphasis mine].

However, at no point during the phone call did Keefe decline the deal. In fact, the word “kill” was not the interviewer’s. It was his–specifically.

I then asked Keefe if he “would not accept a pay-for-play deal,” to which he responded: “Never, in fact what I told the interviewer is they had to go bargain with the EPI, not me.”  That is true. He did advise our agent that his compensation would be worked out with the EPI, but under the apparent implicit understanding he would be the one commissioned, explaining, “[the EPI] bring a lot of resources to the table that’s very helpful for me to do this work.”

When I read him the EPI mission statement, asserting that it “conduct[s] research according to rigorous standards of objectivity,” Keefe affirmed it, saying, “Absolutely.”

Yet during the phone call, Keefe had emphasized how it is “important to do business with policy institutes rather than academics,” laughingly noting that “[a]cademics believe in publish or perish … no matter what the outcome is.” He reassured us that “Policy institutes have an policy agenda … The thing about EPI is when they publish something, it’s highly reliable and credible, but if it’s contrary to what you want, and what they want, they just, they pay for it, and they kill it.”

Earlier in the call, Keefe recommended that our caller contact EPI President Larry Michele and Policy Matters Ohio executive director Amy Hanauer, which he did, offering the same deal. Sam Stein of The Huffington Post reported, after hearing from both of them, that both had declined the deal offered by our interviewer, with Hanauer explaining: “They were fishing for us to say we would release it if it had a pro-union point of view or kill it if it didn’t.” Michel added, “I told him, you know, you can’t buy results.”

Policy Matters Ohio released a statement claiming to be “amused” by our “trying to get [their] director, Amy Hanauer to reveal a desire to deliver biased research,” adding: “Policy Matters is not for sale. We do unassailable research.”

We commend Hanauer and Policy Matters Ohio for maintaining their integrity, but their deserved self-vindications do not make the situation any less awkward for Keefe or EPI.

Worse, like mosquitoes to a bug-zapper, mouthwatering liberal media flocked to Stein’s incomplete narrative. Deriding our investigation as a “ratfucking” effort, Huffington’’s Dan Mirvish accused James of getting “caught with his pants down.” David Dayen of Jane Hamsher’s FireDogLake mocked it, facetiously describing it as “a brilliant plan.” Joseph Anonymous of liberal Ohio blog Plunderbund, advised us: “Consider this your notice, boys. Everyone in Ohio is on to your scam.” Laura Clawson of Daily Kos wrote: “Calling [James] on it before he has the chance? That’s pretty awesome.”

What is even more “awesome” is calling these critics out on their rush to judgment before all the evidence had been presented.

Most unfortunate was Stein’s decision to fire the starting gun. He has made it relevant for us to include allegations about his own journalistic methods that were made by a former tutor of his, which we discovered in the course of our investigation.

Columbia journalism professor Dale Maharidge told an undercover Veritas reporter, admiringly, that Stein “goes out drinking at night with people. Real reality, not virtual reality. He gets booze in people, and suddenly the stories flooooww.”

More will be revealed in Project Veritas’s upcoming series, “To Catch a Journalist.” Stay tuned.

Recently, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz and White House reporter Tommy Christopher attacked Andrew Breitbart and myself for a “failed ambush” after I released Project Mayhem, Part II, which included video in which I broke the first rule of Project Mayhem, and asked Schultz how Ohio Senate Bill 5 allegedly takes away union rights to bargain on safety, which he and his panel contended, when it specifically does the opposite.

Recounting this in a subsequent broadcast, calling me part of a “goon squad,” Schultz explained that “after the show, one of Andrew Breitbart’s lackeys ambushed me.”

First of all, I did not “ambush” him; I asked him for a few moments of his time for an interview and he agreed. Perhaps I should from now on duck, cover and scream “Help!” every time some Greenpeace member asks me if I have a moment for the environment.

Apparently Schultz’s definition of the term “ambush” is any consensual interview in which specific questions are asked which don’t comfortably warrant platitudinal answers. (By this rationale, most questions towards President Obama regarding specific language in Obamacare are ripe for secret service intervention.)

Schultz continued: “It wasn’t a scheduled interview he just came up and started talking.”

Actually we did schedule it. I asked, “Hi Mr. Schultz, can I ask you a few questions for the people of Ohio?” He said, “Sure.” So I began. I assumed by “sure” he meant “right now is fine,” as opposed to “call my assistant, she knows my schedule this week better than I do.”

In the interview, I pointed out to him that “the bill under Section 4117.08 actually gives the right to unions to be bargain on safety which the Democrat bill of 1983 didn’t.” His response was “that’s not what the firefighters are telling me,” to which I said, “But the bill says so.”

… And it still does. As the author of the bill Shannon Jones advised Schultz in my earlier video, “Reading is fundamental.” In response to the video release, Schultz admitted that while the bill does in fact say so, it at the same time doesn’t say so:

“What Breitbart and the anti-union Republicans don’t want you to know about is Section 4117.14 of the bill … Right now if firefighters and lawmakers have a disagreement, they go to a neutral third party to reach an agreement. In Senate Bill 5, those rights are taken away and the lawmakers — the lawmakers — have the final say.”

Once again, Ed, reading is fundamental. Had Schultz actually read the article I wrote in which the video was embedded, he would have found that this “Breitbart lackey” who “[doesn't] want you to know about … Section 4117.14,” specifically mentioned Section 4117.14.

To be fair, opponents of the bill who have read it at least offer a more nuanced argument than Schultz. Appearing on Rachel Maddow’s show, Mike Weinman, Director of Government Affairs at the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio, told Maddow that “under Senate Bill 5 now, it would be up to city councils whether or not you get that safety equipment.”

And this is true. SB 5 does, in fact, replace unfirable binding arbitrators unaccountable for budget solvency with elected officials answerable to both the taxpayer and the unions. In the private sector, this would be the equivalent of allowing the actual manager (who has a tangible stake in keeping the company solvent so as to avoid lay-offs) to negotiate with the union, rather than an uninvested yes man to waltz in, high-five union members and decide how much money said manager may have to pull out of thin air to accommodate.

Of course, the only reason I pointed out this change under SB 5 was because I did not want anyone to know about it. Perhaps I would have had better luck pointing it out on MSNBC.

Schultz then turned to Jack Reall, playing my clip in which Reall said:

“That lieutenant sitting in the seat next to you, going into the fire with you, has no right to bargain for his safety, his staffing, his safety equipment. And that is bullshit.”

I had followed that clip with a title card reading: “…At least that claim is. Under SB 5: ‘… equipment issues directly related to personal safety are subject to collective bargaining.’ (ORC 4117.08)”

After playing the clip, Schultz noted:

“As you can see from the video, they did a great job of editing, but they forgot to take out the first part which was ‘the lieutenant sitting in the seat next to you.’ [SB 5] removes the rights of any supervisor to be in a bargaining unit or have a bargaining agreement. That means lieutenants, captains and battalion chiefs in the fire department have no right to bargain for anything.”

Reall was referring to Section 4117.06, which reads:

[I]n determining the appropriate unit, the board shall not…with respect to members of a fire department, designate as appropriate a unit that includes rank and file members of the department with members who are of the rank of lieutenant or above.

While I hate to break the bad news to Reall, he does still have the right to bargain for his safety. Unless his right to the victim card is of more value than that of the rights he is claiming to be a victim of losing, the term “bad news” is relative.

Section 4117.06 simply means that members who are of the rank of lieutenant of above cannot be including in the same bargaining unit as that of rank and file. This does not preclude lieutenants and their superiors from bargaining altogether, within their own unit.

Under the 1983 law, everyone save the chief was in the same bargaining unit as the rank and file. SB 5 simply puts firemen in the same situation as the police, which is to separate the bargaining units so that lieutenants, captains and assistant chiefs could organize and have their own unit and bargain for the same list of items as the rank and file.

To clarify this, I spoke with Jonathan Downs, attorney specializing in employment law with an emphasis on public unions, representing cities, counties and school boards throughout the state, a number of clients of whose have contracts with fire, police and county sherrifs.

Perhaps I would not have to keep pulling the rug out from under every one of Schultz’s lies if someone would be kind enough to hand him a copy of the actual bill. But then, of course, that might constitute an ambush.

When he’s not busy encouraging Massachusetts voters to commit voter fraud to “keep these bastards out,” or condemning “tea party rhetoric” for not “rising to the president’s challenge on tone” while calling Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut,” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz indulges his hobby of swooping into states like Wisconsin and Ohio, becoming an overnight expert on legislation he is only familiar with from having skimmed through SEIU-furnished Cliffs Notes, calling the legislation “racist” while cheerleading union rallies with applause-cuing platitudes, waving his arms in solidarity and then peacing out.

Schultz made a recent visit to Columbus, Ohio in which he had Congressman Tim Ryan (whom I had interviewed hours prior about Senate Bill 5’s alleged confiscation of safety equipment) and Senator Sherrod Brown on the show against a backdrop of union firefighters to whom, during commercial breaks, Schultz yelled that SB 5 “makes me believe Jimmy Hoffa even more that they are sons of bitches!” Throughout the broadcast Schultz and his guests parroted the manufactured mantra that the bill takes away safety equipment, perhaps almost enough times to make it true.

Admittedly breaking the SEIU’s first rule of Project Mayhem, I subsequently interviewed Schultz on camera and asked him to respond to the fact that the bill gives bargaining rights on safety equipment — which the Democrats’ earlier bill didn’t, citing the exact section number — to which he offered a Pulitzer Prize-warranting response: “That’s not what the firefighters are telling me.”

Well Ed, that may not be what the firefighters are telling you the bill says, but it is what the bill is telling me the bill says. When I later asked the author of SB 5, State Senator Shannon Jones, to respond to Schultz’s talking points, she clarified the provision in depth, noting to Schultz that “reading is fundamental.”

Surely Schultz must concur. A Democrat-registered tea partier once called into Schultz’s radio program to respectfully express his opposition to Obamacare, to which Schultz promptly called him an “idiot,” continuing:

“Did you pick up the damn bill and read it?! YES OR NO?! God, go pick up your gun and march if it makes you feel better because you’re too stupid to read!”

I’ll abstain from meeting Schultz where he is in terms of social graces by questioning his literacy, but would at least like to know when it came to SB 5, whether Schultz himself picked up the damn bill and read it.

Although Ohio Democrats’ 1983 collective bargaining bill never specified unions’ right to bargain on safety equipment, SB 5 did. Under Section 4117.08, the bill states that “equipment issues directly related to personal safety are subject to collective bargaining.” (ORC 4117.08). Until union front group We Are Ohio informs me that the Latin translation of “are subject to” is “are not subject to,” I will allow the English translation to suffice for now.

To be fair, opponents of the bill who have read it at least offer a more nuanced argument than Schultz. Appearing on Rachel Maddow’s show, Mike Weinman, Director of Government Affairs at the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio, told Maddow that “under Senate Bill 5 now, it would be up to city councils whether or not you get that safety equipment.”

And this is true. SB 5 does, in fact, replace unfirable binding arbitrators unaccountable for budget solvency with elected officials answerable to both the taxpayer and the unions. In the private sector, this would be the equivalent of allowing the actual manager (who has a tangible stake in keeping the company solvent so as to avoid lay-offs) to negotiate with the union, rather than an uninvested yes man to waltz in, high-five union members and decide how much money said manager may have to pull out of thin air to accommodate.

Since in this case, the “manager” is the community’s taxpayers who depend upon firefighters on a life or death basis, perhaps the benefit of the doubt is owed to the notion that they most likely prefer a well-equipped, well-staffed fire department to do a bit more for them than save cats from trees. But that’s just what citizens who value their lives and safety are telling me.

It is only poetic that when Schultz had SB 5-proponent, former firefighter and Toledo mayor Mike Bell on his show to explain his support for the bill, protestors chanted one of their favorite SEIU mantras — “Hey hey! Ho ho! John Kasich has got to go!” — to muffle the response Bell was gallantly attempting to give. As Bell told Schultz a few minutes later, “When the yelling and screaming and all that is over, we still have to be able to pay the bills.” And this statement may be true, but unfortunately, it doesn’t rhyme.

The reason the mainstream media has been so perennially successful at maintaning its monopoly on news is its predatory seduction of collective emotional forethought; catering to the limbic system in the absence of logic and catalyzing knee-jerk reactionism. Its only train of actual thought is: throw a tantrum, ask questions later; condemn the bill, read it later. (Or as Nancy Pelosi would have it: “pass the bill,” then “find out what’s in it.”)

So where is Michael Moore to drive up and down 30 Rock in an ice cream truck reading SB 5 to NBC studios over a loudspeaker when we need him? Oh that’s right, he’s busy helping Schultz up the ante on Jimmy Hoffa’s threats of civil war.

That night in Columbus, Schultz spent his entire broadcast flaunting an empty chair with the name “Governor John Kasich” imprinted on it, deriding Kasich for declining his invitation to appear on the show, calling him a “chicken” for supposedly fleeing the interview. Afterward, when I informed Schultz of Section 4117.08, Schultz dismissively walked away. It may be fair to call this “fleeing the interview,” but then of course, that’s just what common sense is telling me.

As Andrew Breitbart recounts in his excellent new book Righteous Indignation, when James O’Keefe first showed him a series of tapes in which he and Hannah Giles had posed as a pimp and a prostitute successfully requesting help from ACORN to set up brothels for their 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, James turned to Andrew and said, “We’re going to take down ACORN.” Andrew responded, “No. We’re going to take down the media.”

And sure enough and ever since, with every video James, Andrew, Hannah, Lila Rose and I have released exposing corruption, fraud, waste, hypocrisy, racism, and socialism within the institutional left, the mainstream media has swarmed with haste like mosquitoes to a bug-zapper in an effort to discredit us – only to, in so doing, discredit themselves. It has truly been a laugh riot to observe.

As Saul Alinsky would have it, they have picked us as targets, frozen us, personalized us, and attempted to polarize us by attaching winning catch-terms out of their apparently limited vocabulary: “hoax,” “racist,” “heavily-edited.”

I covered the MSM’s reaction to the ACORN tapes in column after column. After the tapes were released, a tax-payer funded community organization giving tax fraud advice to a couple with an underage human trafficking ring didn’t matter – as Rachel Maddow addressed the real question: Was James wearing his grandmother’s chinchilla inside the offices, or just the B-roll? And of course my pal Tommy Christopher of Mediaite.com and Max Blumenthal of Salon.com wanted to know, was James’ pimp outfit meant to imply “racial overtones”? Courage, guys.

When James was arrested in New Orleans for entering an office open to the public to see if Sen. Mary Landrieu’s staffers would confirm or deny that the senator’s phone lines were indeed jammed as Landrieu had claimed in the midst of constituent outrage over her nefarious “Lousiana Purchase” deal, our friends at MSNBC wasted no time in preempting the New Orleans federal district court to deliver the verdict: It was “Watergate, Jr.,” the intent was to “wiretap,” and “tamper with the phone lines,” and that’s all you need to know – please, no follow-up questions, moving on …

After James and I released “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” exposing voter fraud, misappropriation of public funds, racism and bad faith negotiating, Media Matters insisted the soundbites were deceptively mismatched. After I released raw footage disproving this charge, I was then accused of hiring an actress (with uncannily identical vocal chords) to ADR specific parts of the actual spoken sentences. Yes, the conspiracy theory had officially reached meth addict status, yet this was somehow good enough for Media Matters and the Star Ledger.

When I released footage of left-wing union demonstrators at a Common Cause rally in Palm Springs calling for the lynching of Clarence Thomas, (drastically inconveniencing the left’s anti-conservative post-Tucson narrative), Tommy Christopher once again swooped in for the save, accusing me of “egging them on” (apparently, wherever Tommy comes from, every normal person is just an “egging on” away from letting out their inner Bull Connor).

The Center for Media and Democracy then accused me of staging the event with an ensemble cast, as they pointed out that my subjects “looked to be wearing wigs or disguises.” It was then that I actually found myself taking offense on behalf of those I had exposed. I mean, it’s one thing to be exposed as foaming-at-the-mouth racists, but to be called wig-clad sideshow freaks on top of it? Jeez.

The Daily Kos and CrooksandLiars.com used this same narrative against Andrew and myself shortly thereafter – when we exposed physicians committing illegal fraud to abet delinquent, self-interested union teachers in Madison, Wisconsin — and were promptly, and brilliantly satirized by Mike Flynn.

In James’ latest NPR investigation, NPR’s narrative was that the Muslim Brotherhood’s $5,000,000,000 donation was “rejected.” Well, James swiftly shut that one down with his subsequent release of video exposing that as a blatant lie. Whoops!

There is simply no imaginable incentive to point the fingers at us—the investigators—rather than the subjects of our investigations, aside from ideological alliance thereto and consequent, understandable protective impulses.

Mainstream media: We have shared quite a bizarre dance with you the past year and a half, and have recognized that it won’t end any time soon. So enjoy our little commemorative paean to it. This is our ode to you.

The only reason these parallels don’t work is that while Charles Manson did in fact draw inspiration from “The White Album,” John Hinckley from “Taxi Driver,” Harris and Klebold from “Natural Born Killers” and (somewhat debatably) Marilyn Manson, and David Berkowitz from a Labrador retriever, there is no evidence Jared Loughner even watched Fox News or leaned right. Inconveniently, a former friend and bandmate described Loughern as “left-wing political radical” and “quite liberal,” and Loughner claimed The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books on his YouTube page where he also released video burning the American flag.

But when it comes to exploiting human tragedy to “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it” (in Saul Alinsky’s words), no facts will obstruct a perfectly salvageable mainstream media narrative.

Writing in The New York Times, Paul Krugman mouthwateringly jumped at the bit to officialize the tragedy as a cue for “the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers,” giving dire caution over “the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead,” and blaming a “climate of hate.” Jane Fonda blamed the tragedy on “violence-provoking rhetoric of the Tea Party” – a movement whose standards of civility apparently don’t live up to those of the Viet Cong.

This “climate of hate” and “violence-provoking rhetoric” certainly wouldn’t include the congressional maps put out by the Democrat Leadership Committee using actual shooting targets (as opposed to the surveyor crosshairs used by SarahPAC), nor Barack Obama’s 2008 “if they bring a knife to a fight we bring a gun” remarks, nor the environmentalist 10:10 “No Pressure” ad featuring children being blown up for questioning green control tactics, nor the West Hollywood display of Sarah Palin hanging from a noose, nor the feature film “Death of a President” fantasizing the assassination of George W. Bush, nor Wanda Sykes giving President Obama a good tickle by wishing kidney failure upon Rush Limbaugh, nor Bill Maher regretting that the terrorist assassination plot against Dick Cheney didn’t pan out, nor even the gunshots fired into Republican Congressman Eric Cantor’s office during this past spring.

Naturally, only conservatives are to blame for a violent act by an apparent liberal. And instead of blaming Al Gore and the environmental movement for James J. Lee, the man who held three hostages at the Discovery Channel building with explosives attached to him this past September and claimed An Inconvenient Truth as his inspiration, we blamed one person: James J. Lee. For the same reason, here is a list of people I blame for the Tucson shooting (forgive the brevity):

1) Jared Lee Loughner

2) See 1)

I have publicly criticized zealous, unguarded conservative tactics before, such as in my piece Keep the Tea Kool-Aid Free and been chastised for it. Nevertheless, sorry, but I will not blame ignorant conservative tactics for this shooting by a described left-wing radical. Nor will I ever blame a violent act on anyone save the perpetrator. Tellingly, there has yet to be one conservative commentator to exploit what we know of Loughner’s leftist background to fault leftism itself. I will not be the first do that anymore than I will blame leftism for the shootings of Presidents James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy—all of whom were shot by left-wing radicals.

It is a shame that six innocent lives were taken in Tucson and instead of being a nation in mourning we are perversely forced to have a political debate. It is the same impulse which we see far too often on the left that insatiably itches for division in America, injecting political poison into apolitical or non-racial events to resurrect factionalism in race, class and persuasion—be it the Henry Louis Gates arrest, the Duke lacrosse “rape,” Hurricane Katrina, the SB1070 bill, the 2008 election, and endless other instances. “Progressives” are now demanding that divisiveness be toned down? Please, be my guests.

In Spike Lee’s brilliant 1999 film “Summer of Sam,” a group of friends begins to use the Son of Sam murders as a catharsis for their internecine animosities towards one another to the extent of forming lynch mobs. Perhaps there is an element of human nature that compels many to react to a tragedy by spreading the blame around. But I have a strange feeling we can do better.

In my previous column, “Teachers Unions Gone Wild: The Director’s Commentary (Part 1),” I challenged Media Matters — who pompously mocked Trenton Tea Party Leader Daryl Brooks for believing in the authenticity of our videos because “[James] told [him]” they were — to hold Alissa Ploshnick and her spokesman Steve Wolmer to the same standard as Brooks.

Steve Wolmer spoke on behalf of Alissa Ploshnick, who is now “in seclusion,” claiming that when editing “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” I maliciously grouped two soundbites of hers together that were allegedly uttered in totally separate contexts. Wolmer claims that Ploshnick’s comment about a teacher calling a student the N word was actually an anecdote about a student-to-student confrontation in her high school days, and “had nothing to do with tenure.” Wolmer explains that we “edited that out and put it in the tenure conversation to make it look like that was the context.”

While I was admittedly tempted to sit back and hear more of their creative fairy tales, I had to set the record straight and release the unedited raw audio of Ploshnick’s dialogue, pulling the rug out from under her and Wolmer’s lies.

What is even more amusing is that Media Matters, after snobbishly chastising Brooks for trusting James’ word that the videos were authentic, flipped a 180 and took at face value Ploshnick’s and Wolmer’s alibis which I have now proven to be undeniable lies.

Upon receiving wind of Ploshnick’s lies, jumped and clapped like kids in a candy store to trumpet her case, albeit taking her words at face value: “I’m sure you will be shocked to learn that Ploshnick now reportedly believes her comments were taken out of context,” concluding that “out-of-context videos” are now obviously “synonymous with O’Keefe’s name.” In a subsequent piece, Media Matters goes right ahead and definitely calls “Teachers Unions Gone Wild” a “series of heavily edited smear videos.”

Media Matters has officially renewed its reliability as a pollutive factory of smears, lies and blatant hypocrisy. They have yet to produce any evidence of Brooks’ foolishness for trusting James, save for the testimony they ravenously gobbled up which is now a proven lie — which only proves that they are the fools. They owe the public an apology and until such an apology is made have forfeited any and all credibility.

But then of course, it is Media Matters.

Upon the release of our ACORN videos which featured federally-funded ACORN employees aiding a “pimp” and a “prostitute” in setting up a brothel for 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, the MSM shifted the narrative towards James and Hannah, whether they were lying about their budgets, if Fox News hired them, and whether they were actually dressed as pimps and prostitute while entering the ACORN offices.

Predictably, the MSM has sounded the same recycled narrative in the midst of our more recent release of “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” evidencing tenured teachers calling black students the “N” word without proper reprimand, teachers using a taxpayer-funded New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) conference to rally for “slander” against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and union leaders sharing anecdotes about rigged elections and voter fraud, among other things. Rather than investigate the findings of our investigation, the media has found it more pressing to investigate us.

It’s embarrassing enough that we mere twenty-somethings manage to scoop seasoned, established mainstream journalists on outing corruption, fraud, and waste in government. So it is ironic that mainstream journalists feel compelled to embarrass themselves further by dismissing the juicy meat of our exposés to cover our material with awkwardly petty and irrelevant lines of questioning. They are like high school cheerleaders envious over the new girl who just started dating the captain of the football team. Like, do you have a rich family? Are you like, just a poseur or something?

I am sure the parents of New Jersey are just so fascinated with the financial logistics of our investigative videos rather than the inescapable fact that their children are subject to arrogant, sleazy, sometimes racist teachers committing voter fraud, wanting to f*** with kids, and calling black kids n*****s without consequence. And as Gov. Chris Christie himself said regarding our video, “[i]t hurts the great teachers just as much as it hurts our kids.”

However, rather than evince any concern for the behavior of our subjects caught on tape, the union has sought to ease the public’s concern by insisting our tapes were “doctored” and “dubbed.”

I hate to be a nuisance and have to delegitimize the adorable little last-minute narratives being drummed up by the NJEA members and some of our esteemed colleagues in the journalism world, but having directed “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” edited and supervised the whole post-production process, I kind of, sort of happen to have all the raw footage directly at my disposal.

Do I selectively edit the videos? Well, against the risk of boring my audience with the tedious entirety of all the dozens of hours of raw footage we have, yes. After all, it was Hitchcock who said that film is “life with all the boring parts cut out.” But is “selective” synonymous with “deceptive”? No. I would not call out CNN for, in a recent documentary about me, selectively separating my most interesting soundbites from my mundane rambling, nor has anyone else. But if our detractors are so eager to be bored to death, I am more than happy to release the raw footage in context.

But what’s even more interesting — actually fascinating, and to us, disappointing — is Alissa Ploshnick’s recent self-reduction in the form of a hereby provable lie about something so petty that I cannot imagine why it warranted such a forfeiture of integrity. Ploshnick now establishes (to the MSM’s mouthwatering delight) a predictable “heavily edited” narrative by way of her spokesman Steve Wolmer’s talking points.

NJEA Communications Director Steve Wolmer has come forward on behalf of the “sheltered” Ploshnick, insisting that the recorded talking points of hers we have — including her emphasis on how “hard” it is to fire a tenured teacher, as well as her sharing of an anecdote in which a tenured teacher called a student the “N” word only to be slapped on the wrist with a demotion — were manipulatively tossed into the same context when they were uttered in totally separate contexts.

Wolmer explains that Ploshnick was recounting an episode from her own high school days in Clifton High twenty years ago, in which a mere student called another student the “N” word in the hallway, insinuating it was shared in a totally separate context from her emphasis on how hard it is to fire tenured teachers.

Most saddening to me is the fact that Alissa Ploshnick, while arguably a star in our video, until recently has held a rather clean bill of health. All she did, according to our video, is unwittingly blow the whistle on a fellow teacher who called a black student the “N” word, and subsequently (albeit bizarrely) avoided James’s approach for follow-up and in due course tried to stalk him on his way home. Basically, she had neither done, nor said anything wrong — until now.

Via her spokesman, Wolmer, in an unfortunate attempt to discredit us, Ploshnick has unnecessarily discredited herself by insisting I manipulatively grouped her emphasis on the difficulty of firing a tenured teacher with her anecdote about a colleague calling a black student the “N” word. Did I separate the two soundbites to accommodate a voice-over punctuation in between? Yes I did. But now, I will present to you the monolithic clip incorporating both soundbites side-by-side which she has since claimed to be uttered on separate terms:

While I enjoy observing the desperation and creative conspiracy theories of these teachers in suspect and the liberal press for my own amusement purposes, my journalistic ethics compel me to set the record straight.

It was never our intention to bring Ploshnick down, thus it is saddening to me that she has insisted on bringing herself down with an unnecessary lie and distortion of the facts in an apparent (and unsuccessful) attempt to protect her brothers in arms (or at least not be seen as a whistleblower thereof). I both regret Ploshnick’s Nixonian cover-up and wonder how Wolmer himself sleeps at night, and possibly returns home to a wife and children knowing he is a shameless liar with zero hesitation to mislead the public for the sole sake of protecting his fellow union flock. I now have no choice but to view both instances as disturbing testament to otherwise-innocent individuals committing credibility suicide in the name of corrupt union fraternization. They didn’t need to do this to themselves, but in challenging our credibility, they ended their own.

Despite the 20-gauge holes in these detractors’ testimonies, the mainstream media has seen fit to give them the benefit of the doubt. Media Matters, who has apparently decided that rigged elections, voter fraud, and institutionalized racism don’t matter, made their concerns clear in the headline “James O’Keefe doesn’t show up for his own press conference,” challenging Trenton Tea Party Leader Daryl Brooks to explain why O’Keefe didn’t show up to a conference O’Keefe never promised to show up to. This, of course, was at the expense of pursuing any investigation into the transgressions of the teachers in suspect, merely ridiculing Brooks for taking O’Keefe’s claims of video authenticity at face value.

Out of blind respect for Media Matters, I hereby challenge them to hold Steve Wolmer to the same standard, going equally so far as to ridicule him for taking Ploshnick’s testimony at face value — to the detriment of his own credibility and his own integrity, what with the disclosure of the above video.

We live in a society where in the past couple months several gay students have tragically ended their lives as a response to homophobic bullying. As a result, media muckrakers Wanda Sykes and Kathy Griffn have taken it upon themselves to establish a narrative implicating conservatives as indirectly culpable for their deaths. Will the MSM now shrug off evidence of not a student, but a teacher, bullying a student with the worst possible racial epithet, in the name of Proletarians of the World Unite?

The coming days will tell us, and this is their moment to prove our expectations wrong. So far, they get a resounding “F.”

First: Let’s not overdo it with the 18^th century costumes. While festive and somewhat thematically appropriate, it doesn’t speak to my generation, and often begs the mainstream media to caricaturize us as Halloween-padded fringe throwbacks. We can all agree on restoring the constitutional vision of our founding fathers, but restoring their fashion sensibilities? You will have to call me a progressive on that one.

Second: A convenient Tea Party mantra has been the presumptuous, and seemingly amnesiac notion that President Obama “betrayed the American people,” that “We the People have spoken and never wanted Obama’s policies.”

Obama made his agenda clear during his campaign: He promised to socialize health care, to push for cap and trade, to implement tax policies that would “spread the wealth around,” he equated redistribution of wealth with “neighborliness,” supported the 2008 Wall Street bailouts, demonstrated his faith in Keynesian economics, his class warfare mentality, his distrust for the free market…

We the People were given these promises and facts, and We the People elected Barack Obama president by a 7 percent margin. Period. In fact, many of the promises the left held Obama to were broken, including his promise to preserve bans on offshore drilling, to close Guantanamo, to pass an immigration bill in the first year, and to pass the Freedom of Choice act, among other things. Thus the President has even fallen shy of satisfying his most liberal supporters.

To trumpet this narrative makes conservatives seem like sore losers in denial, and to threaten a “second revolution” with upside-down flags as a reaction to losing a fair election speaks more about a general bitterness towards the electoral process itself which is inconsistent with our supposedly superlative support for the constitution.

Third: Obama’s “Muslim faith” is not a winning issue. Since eye-opening footage of Obama touring a mosque in Turkey and shocking soundbites of him pandering to Muslims (much the same way Bush did) hardly constitutes proof, it would behoove me to insist that the burden of proof is on those that trumpet this charge. But even more pressing is the burden of proving why moderates should consider this worthy of the term “charge.” Most who embrace our conservative ideals will have a few questions about the difference between the Muslim way to veto a spending bill and the Christian way to veto a spending bill.

The issue raised by this “issue” is not the President’s, it’s ours. Frightful imaginings of American intifada may be conjured in the minds of the few who have never met a civilized Muslim and are unaware that there happens to be a difference between Faisal Shahzad and Ice Cube, but amongst moderates and independents, even more frightful imaginings of paranoid xenophobia on our part are likely to arise. The only eyebrows raised over claims of Obama’s “Muslim faith” are not at Obama, they are at us.

Fourth: The incessant nitpicking of the President has got to stop. As a teenager during the previous administration with few political beliefs but a belief in basic human decency, the pathological hatred and obsessive scrutiny of George Bush’s every move spoke volumes to me about an opposition with a deficit of decency and an oozing, unconditional bitterness that was disturbingly viral. This was the first observation that had me veering right. Thus, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow hosting a panel discussion on the President’s choice to give a departing Rahm Emanuel a “weakness”-projecting hug rather than a “dignified” handshake, and FOX News’ Sean Hannity running a segment about Obama’s choice to order French Dijon mustard on his cheeseburger rather than American ketchup begins to sound an unpleasant echo.

Fifth: the apocalyptic end-of-the-republic-as-we-know-it rhetoric, while possibly true, probably makes moderates feel they are being put on and reinforces the right’s reputation for fear-mongering, and most importantly, deludes our message. The most effective communication of the conservative message today has come from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who speaks directly to an issue with matter-of-fact reasoning and a down-to-earth demeanor and without any apparent need for a green-screened lightning bolt behind him with thunderbolt sound effect cues. He will explain to an initially indignant union teacher why balancing the budget required a 1.5 percent payroll deduction and have her nodding in agreement by the end of his explanation, and will manage to do so without a long-hanging cravat and full-bottomed wig and without sounding the seven trumpets.

The beautiful simplicity of the conservative message risks getting muffled in a chorus of intellectual dead end mantras and mouth-foaming contrarianism. It has been made clear whom we stand against, but not what we stand for. Our message is simple: That the sole purpose of government is the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice, and that when government ventures beyond these functions, it accumulates power, which diminishes liberty; that when it interferes with the work of the market economy, it reduces the strength of the nation; and when it takes from one to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both.

I’m confident most in my generation would embrace our message if they simply knew it was that simple, and could hear it more audibly over the screaming about Obama’s Muslim faith, the hyena-like cackling over his every move, the beating of the drums and the battle cries for the coming revolution.

Besides, Dijon mustard tastes alright.

My traveling companions were Matt Sanchez, a Move America Forward volunteer and producer of Fox News’ The Strategy Room; Mary Pearson, photographer; and Debbie Lee, the founder of America’s Mighty Warriors, a Gold Star mom whose son, Marc Allen Lee, was the first Navy-SEAL killed in Iraq during a fight in Ramadi on August 2, 2006.

In his last letter home, Marc had written:

What I do over here is only a small percent of what keeps our country great. I think the truth to our greatness is each other. Purity, morals and kindness, passed down to each generation through example. So to all my family and friends, do me a favor and pass on the kindness, the love, the precious gift of human life to each other so that when your children come into contact with a great conflict that we are now faced with here in Iraq, that they are people of humanity, of pure motives, of compassion.

What I was to find on this trip was that despite the mainstream media’s frantic pursuit to staple Abu Ghraib in our minds as an emblem of the U.S. presence in Iraq, by the end of my travels I was unmistakably and undeliberately convinced that Marc Allen Lee is the true embodiment of not only the U.S. military, but the American character itself.

Our itinerary included visits in Kuwait, Baghdad and Kirkuk with soldiers, Marines and airmen – both American and Iraqi. Among the four of Saddam’s palaces I visited was one which Saddam had named “Victory Over America” – a name slightly inconvenienced by the demolished side wing that sunk into a massive mound of dirt and rubble. (Whoops! Did we do that?)

Adjacent the palace was a two-story lake house in which Saddam was known to have housed his virgins. After he was done raping them, he would behead, drown, or throw them off the balcony. The balcony rail was marked by a finite succession of hearts – each symbolizing one of these unwitting lovers. As I gazed up at it, I could not help but consider the fact that had those who fiercely filibustered the war gotten their way, at least several more of those hearts would be adorning that rail.

Socrates said that “no man knowingly does evil.” But even the most nightmarish monsters of the world wrestle with some inconvenient notion – and with it some means of putting it to rest. This is why Saddam – who believed God could not see over water – encompassed these buildings with a lake. But the airborne demolition of that side wing of his palace may have been a subtle reminder that perhaps God does, indeed, have aerial vision.

As much as Saddam intended to hide his shame with that lake, not even his means of filling it were exempt from shame. Saddam had gone right ahead and cut off the water supply to the Shi’a in southern Iraq to fill his precious lake. (You know, kind of like what congressional Democrats did to our farmers in central California.)

Diversity — with respect to age, race, gender, religion, nationality and rank – we found. Where we didn’t find diversity was in the collective mood – optimism and pride in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The boyish excitement of Brigadier General Scott Hansen over his trainees – the Iraqi Air Force – resembled that of an older brother who had successfully mentored his younger sibling to be an all-star home-run hitter. The chemistry and camaraderie between U.S. and Iraqi forces suffered no cold distance, no awkwardness, no air of discomfort.

These observations incited both excitement and anger. I knew this was history in the making, and I knew the mainstream media had decided that the American public would miss out on it.

The left-driven press has fought its own campaign to incite strife by dividing our country up by race, class, religion and political persuasion. Of course it would want to divide up the world in the same image.

Having determined before the first U.S. boots hit the ground that this would not be a successful operation, the media began conceding defeat on behalf of our nation almost instantly. Over seven years, neither the capture of Saddam, the purple ink-stained fingers of the new Iraqi democrats, the success of the surge, nor what we found in just ten days would dare disrupt their predetermined narrative. Such images of success were not among their storyboards.

This is almost the equivalent of V-E day ending up on page 18C of The New York Times. Not only has the mainstream media let us down, they have taken something from us. They have taken from us the opportunity to take pride in our nation during one of her finest hours.

We know that in our own history, every trend of tyranny or terror was most effectively bulldozed by the expansions of freedom. The fact that the KKK has been reduced to a fringe cult standing against the loser wall of the proverbial dance hall is less because of Lyndon Johnson’s executive orders and more because in a free society such a pathetic band of outsiders would suffer the same fate as as a Denver Broncos pep rally in downtown Oakland. Terror can’t breathe in a free society. It chokes and suffocates in America and is panting a lot harder now in Iraq.

The fact that the cold, bitter left would rather continue grinding their teeth and clenching onto their pathological hatred for George W. Bush than take pride in what our country has accomplished this time through our unstoppable warriors is as sad as it is shameful. That we have shared our unique gift of freedom with a new nation may be easily dismissable as a rhetorical sound bite,  but is a living reality worth serious contemplation.

On our final day in country, when my cameras were off and it was just myself and Debbie speaking with Lt. Colonel Kyle Voigt off-the-record about our families, memories, and other matters of the heart, the colonel moved in close and whispered the following with the discreet, quiet dignity of a shared secret that could not otherwise be understood by the world but only among close confidents:

We have done something very special here – something that no other civilization has done in the history of the world. We have freed a country, without asking anything in return except friendship.

As I subsequently returned to my CHU to pack up my luggage, I reflected on the friends I had made amongst the Iraqi Air Force, the handshakes that somehow felt like massive group hugs between two populations than mere hand-to-hand contacts. I thought about this experiment we Americans took a chance on 235 years ago and the expanding laboratory that these people had just been openly invited into.

I thought of the fact that just eight years ago, encounters under such circumstances would have been laughably fantastical.

For the past nine months, Media Matters for America has obsessively defended ACORN’s video-verified role in helping James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles set up a brothel for pubsescent sex slaves on the basis that James was not dressed as a pimp and that Hannah was not dressed as a prostitute — as she was in my creative b-roll portion of the videos — when entering the offices.

Despite the audio-recorded conversations in which Hannah was indisputably introduced as a prostitute requesting ACORN’s assistance in establishing a brothel, in which almost all ACORN workers approached offered their assistance — in Media Matters’ eyes, the wardrobe factor automatically rendered the damning investigation a “practical joke” and a “hoax.”

But while they laughed at the apparently trivial reality of a taxpayer-funded organization enabling underaged sex slavery, when O’Keefe set up in New Orleans what was actually intended as a practical joke to be taped and put up on YouTube as a minor radar-blip project to punctuate his more serious investigations — the left was not laughing.

After Senator Mary Landrieu’s constituents raised suspicion that the senator was deliberately ignoring their calls in the midst of her sketchy Louisiana Purchase as her office claimed the phone systems were “jammed,” O’Keefe and three colleagues sought to verify the alleged condition of the phones via the staffers’ reactions to their friendly offer of assistance.

James is not the first to employ comedic patronizing of powerful individuals for political satire. Upon learning that most Republican legislators who passed the Patriot Act hadn’t read the legislation, Michael Moore decided to give them a friendly hand by driving around the Capitol with a megaphone reading the bill to them.

But don’t hold it past powerful liberals who squirm, kick and scream like second-graders on a playground when they find themselves the possible targets of a completely harmless, light-humored, well-intentioned prank.

When Clinton administration staffers illegally and egregiously trashed, vandalized, burglarized and destroyed White House property in the days leading up to the Bush administration’s move-in, President Bush sportingly refused any investigation or charges, dismissing them as “a prank or two…a cartoon on the wall, but that’s okay.”

When evil trolls egged Sarah Palin at her recent Boston Tea Party appearance and got caught, the stoic, cheerful, good-hearted Tea Party Express leader Sal Russo figured them for some naive kids who were probably at least smart enough to learn their lesson this time, asked the police to let them go and refused to press any charges.

But demonstrating a) the left’s utter lack of any sense of humor, b) their wide-eyed inability to get a joke, or c) their fuming, inferiority-complex-ridden insecurities when it comes to being the butt of a joke — James was swiftly arrested by U.S. Marshals, charged with a crime carrying up to 10 years in prison, and subjected to a political prosecution and months-long circus trial. Furthermore, on top of lying about “illegal wiretapping,” the left screamed that it was “Watergate, Jr.,” an act of terrorism, a felony, a serious federal crime deserving of ten years’ imprisonment.

So if James O’Keefe, Joe Basil, Stan Dai and Michael Flanagan were arrested for “interfering with the senator’s phones” — something that was never committed, but was merely a suggested intent as part of the act — why has James not been prosecuted for his suggested intent of trafficking underage prostitutes from El Salvador?

Ah, yes, of course — because he was not dressed as a pimp when entering the ACORN offices, while on the other hand his colleagues were in fact dressed as telephone repairmen when entering Sen. Landrieu’s office. And as Judge Daniel Knowles III admonished, such behavior was “nefarious” and “potentially dangerous” — thus compelling any Trick-or-Treaters in Village People costumes to reconsider passing by way of the Hale Boggs building in downtown New Orleans this Halloween.

Alongside Keith Olbermann, David Shuster, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews of the maligning, gossiping MSNBC sewing circle, Media Matters for America was the loudest in its defamation blitzkrieg against James. Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert huffed and puffed at James and his “media defenders” of “downplaying and even mocking the charge and the crime,” having “advertised their contempt for the law” by trvializing “entering a federal building under false pretenses.”

The left’s squeamish, meth-addict-like paranoid portrayal of James O’Keefe as a dangerous criminal, as well as the Tea Partiers and conservative town hall meeting attendees as angry mobs prone to violence, is all designed to cast themselves as the victims, not allowing any actual acts or threats of violence against conservative politicians in recent months to disrupt their narrative.

Case in point:

Number of Media Matters stories slamming O’Keefe and his “potentially dangerous acts” in Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu’s office: 58.

Number of Media Matters stories on Norman Leboun, the suspect accused of firing gunshots into Republican Congressman Eric Cantor’s office: 0.

As a matter of fact, the only Media Matters stories written about the shots that were fired into Cantor’s office this past March were titled: “So What Will Right-Wing Bloggers Say About Cantor’s ‘Self-Victimization’?” (March 26) and “What if Fox News Actually Wants Mob Violence?” (March 30) — both of which were written by none other than Eric Boehlert.

Like all of his colleagues on the Media Matters for America staff, Eric Boehlert is a clown. But then, of course, in his defense, we have have yet to find proof that he dresses as a clown when writing his editorials.