In an article published May 28th at CBSNews.com by Carlin DeGuerin Miller, it is twice alleged that James O’Keefe and three activist colleagues plead guilty to attempting to tamper with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans offices.  First, in the headline:

“James O’Keefe and Co. Plead Guilty to Tampering with Senator’s Phones”

And again in the body of the article:

O’Keefe and three  cohorts pleaded guilty Wednesday to dressing up as telephone repairmen in order to tamper with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) office.

O’Keefe and company pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor crime of entering a federal building under false pretenses.  As Patterico pointed out in a similar correction request to New York Magazine issued yesterday, “the government couldn’t prove that he attempted to tamper with the phones in Landrieu’s office — which is why the charges were reduced to the far less serious misdemeanor charge.”

We kindly ask CBS News to issue a formal correction.

**Update here: Boehlert responds…

I am offering Eric Boehlert of Media Matters the easiest $100 he ever made.

All he has to do to earn the $100: unequivocally state whether James O’Keefe pretended to be a pimp at ACORN offices. If Boehlert makes the statement publicly — with no weasel-words, no two-stepping, and no qualifications — I will PayPal him $100.

Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert

I made this offer to Boehlert on Twitter. He’s ignoring me. He even posted one Twitter message in which he said: “Leave me alone.”

Mr. Boehlert, I have you on the ropes. You think I am going to leave you alone? Have we met?

Here’s why Boehlert is ignoring me. He has spent days writing piece after piece about the Terribly Important Issue of whether James O’Keefe was dressed as a pimp at ACORN. But that is a red herring and he knows it. Because no matter how O’Keefe was dressed, he pretended to be a pimp at ACORN. (more…)

We are requesting Keith Olbermann issue an on-air retraction to his repeated assertions that James O’Keefe required “permission from his parole officer” to attend CPAC in Washington, D.C.

Around :40 into the above video, Olbermann says:

O’Keefe accepting an award there, I kid you not, with permission from his parole officer, according to Politico. Trust the law and order party to check in with its parole officers.

Olbermann’s source, Politico.com, has since corrected the bogus claim that O’Keefe needed permission from a “parole office[r].”  Since Olbermann’s source has been discredited, Olbermann himself should correct the record as well.

Fast forward to about 4:00 into the clip and Olbermann has this to say to The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel:

We’ll start with the law and order party, honoring the guy who needs to get his parole officer’s permission to attend.

The assiduous Patterico, who made a similar request of Olbermann last night, pointed out that this time, Olbermann neglected to source his false claim: “Note that, in the second passage, Olbermann does not attribute the claim to Politico, but makes it outright. Meaning he owns this falsehood and has an independent duty to retract it.”

(more…)

You know you’re having a bad day, Joan Walsh, when it’s just you and Max Blumenthal alone in a foxhole while you’re being overwhelmed by the truth. Because David Weigel, one of your sources for Blumenthal’s story and Max’s own blog posts that James O’Keefe once helped organize a “racist conference,”  has now “clarified” his remarks and guess what?  Your story just fell apart.  Read it and weep:

Clarification — and Mea Culpa — on James O’Keefe and ‘Race and Conservatism’

On Wednesday, I wrote a post reacting to Max Blumenthal’s story “James O’Keefe’s Race Problem” and was too quick with a description of the August 30, 2006 Robert Taft Club event on “race and conservatism.” Specifically, I wrote this:

“A zoomed-in headshot of James O’Keefe (after the jump), then working for the Leadership Institute, survived, although it cropped out the table he was sitting at, covered in controversial literature.”

In a later post, I walked this back: While I’d been at the event, it was Isis, a photographer/investigator for the One People’s Project, who told me that her photo was actually a picture of O’Keefe at a table of controversial literature. But several e-mailers and commenters have pointed out that my first post appeared to endorse Blumenthal’s whole story. I want to quickly walk through that story and point out the parts that, based on my experience at the event and interviews with Isis and event organizer Marcus Epstein, were not true.

There follows five points of material error in Blumenthal’s story and in the original post at the “anti-racist” website, One People’ s Project (whose site is adorned with the old Soviet Union colors of red and gold, and features a Soviet-style logo).   Among the revelations: (more…)

Update 1/30: CBS News updated the link text highlighted below.

We thank them for their diligence.

***

Thanks to the sterling work of Patterico, CBS has corrected numerous errors in their coverage of James O’Keefe’s latest investigation.  Before: here.  After: here and here.  Still, CBS has thus far failed to correct a link alledging O’Keefe and the the other three conservative activists are being suspected of bugging.  A screenshot taken today just after 4pm PST:

There are no allegations of any bugging plot in the FBI affidavit, and a law enforcement official has conceded that the four men were not attempting to wiretap or intercept calls.  Furthermore, legal representation for the accused has gone on record stating there were no intentions to bug phones in the Senator’s office.

We kindly ask you to issue a correction/retraction to the story.

We have been/will be making similar requests of other news sources to correct similar errors.  Some, such as the Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, MSNBC’s David Shuster, and CBS News have already have posted corrections or retractions.

Two very reliable web sites (Patterico and Politico) are reporting two different versions of the same basic story:  The identity of Ellie Light.

From Ben Smith:

Well, the mystery may be over. A woman who said her name was, in fact, Ellie Light called this morning into the radio show of Michael Smerconish, a national talker based in Philadelphia who has been friendly to Obama, to clear things up.

“I’m only me,” she said, identifying herself as a traveling nurse who works for 13-week stretches at hospitals around the country, and whose primary residence is in Southern California.

“I need to own up – I did misrepresent my home town in some places,” Light told Smerconish. Her logic in faking the addresses is one familiar to advocacy groups: “If I thought it was written by a neighbor of mine, I would give it more credence.” (more…)

The blogosphere is abuzz with speculation about the real identity of the strange and wonderfully timely “Ellie Light,” President Obama’s No. 1 fan and apparently the owner of more residences than Donald Trump, John McCain and John Kerry combined.  Not to mention an indefatigable letter writer.

With Obama slumping in the polls, and reduced to more campaign-style appearances in front of friendly audiences in lieu of, you know, actually governing, the ethereal Ms. Light has taken pen in hand on multiple occasions to support her (?) fading Hope:

Courtesy of Patterico, a sample excerpt from her bountiful, revisionist, apologetic pen:

A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, that health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly became a nice place to take your kids, we would’ve known we were being lied to. Back then, we recognized that the problems Obama inherited as president wouldn’t go away overnight.

But today, the president is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never made such a promise. It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything.

Why would anyone think Obama had a magic wand?  It’s not as if he’s ever made any extravagant promises: (more…)