Rachel Maddow is joined by Peter Dreier to discuss the right wing smear machine's next targets. As Dreier points out, the Democrats had better start standing up for allies in the progressive community if they don't want those allies along with the Democratic Party destroyed.

MADDOW: Today, the forces that have turned community activist group ACORN into a political pinata set their sights on a White House official. His name is Patrick Gaspard, the political affairs director at the White House. According to an article published in the conservative magazine “The American Spectator,” Mr. Gaspard is a, quote, “longtime ACORN operative.”

ACORN might as well be speaking to President Obama through an earpiece as he goes about his daily business ruining the country. Once an allegation like that is in a conservative magazine, you know what happens next.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEVE DOOCY, FOX NEWS: The White House political director.

GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS: Yes.

DOOCY: . is a fellow by the name of Patrick Gaspard, and he apparently has been in bed with ACORN. So, does ACORN have somebody in the White House.

BECK: You know what‘s really.

DOOCY: . in one way or another?

BECK: You know what‘s really weird is—and the answer to that is yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Actually, the answer to that is no. “The American Spectator‘s” newly discovered evidence that Mr. Gaspard was a longtime ACORN operative was actually a 4-month-old blog post from ACORN‘s founder which incorrectly stated that Mr. Gaspard had been an ACORN employee.

Today, that ACORN founder corrected his original post writing, quote, “Patrick was never on the staff of ACORN,” and that does appear to be the case, he was not an ACORN employee. But why let the facts get in the way of a good smear, right?

Despite this embarrassing misfire, opponents of ACORN and the conservative media and the Republican Party are so confident in the success of their war against ACORN that they‘re already planning who they‘re going after next.

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Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin were all worked up yesterday on Beck's Fox News show about the media's treatment of the town-hall protests. They agreed that the media were ignoring all the "union thuggery" caused by rank-and-file health-care-reform supporters from the SEIU who were showing up at the town halls to counter the right's angry mobs:

Malkin: I think there's a purposeful whitewashing, and a narrative that somehow these unions represent blue-collar workers. That has never been the case. They have never represented the best interest of their dues-paying, card-carrying members. It's always been about enriching and enhancing and aggrandizing the management.

And people need to know what they're up against. You need to know your enemy. The SEIU is 1.8 million members strong. And the dues that they have coerced and squeezed from those members have been poured into Democrats' coffers. Andy Stern, who is the radical social worker turned union heavy, bragged that $80 million of SEIU union dues went to the Democrats in independent expenditures, and a huge chunk of that, of course, directly into Obama's campaign treasury.

Right. Because, of course, Malkin's corporate friends in Republicanland would do so much more to protect the interests of working-class people than unions would.

Malkin's claim that unions have "never" been about helping working-class people is of course grotesquely ahistorical, but fairly typical of corporate shills like Malkin. Indeed, if anyone's doing whitewashing, it's Malkin, who like Beck has airbrushed out of their realities the facts about progressives and unions and the central role they have played in creating the great American middle class upon which these two parasites feast.

But most hilarious is the charge that it's the unions who have introduced violence into this scenario, when in fact the entire tone of these protests from the right has been ugly and violent. The presence of SEIU regulars is essentially in response to the threats fomented by the right. After all, it isn't SEIU members who are calling up teabaggers and threatening them with gun violence -- it's the other way around.

This is underscored by the strange coda that Beck gives at the end of the segment:

Beck: You know, um, I have to tell you I think the clock is ticking, gang. I think everybody needs to back away -- not from your passions, not from what you believe in. You believe in health care, you keep going. You believe it's wrong, you keep going.

But we need to be very, very careful. I fear for the future. Somebody's going to do something stupid and it will change the Republic -- [snaps] -- overnight.

One can only assume that he's referencing his previous plea to his audience not to indulge in acts of violence. And as we can see, he has real reason to be concerned.

But just whose side is it with the propensity for violence and thuggery, Glenn and Michelle?

This weekend the righties got all worked up about the supposed "brutality" of union thugs in St. Louis who they say beat up a black conservative tea partier named Kenneth Gladney who came out to protest the Obama health-care plan on Thursday. They even had a big protest the next day, along with a press conference featuring Gladney in a wheelchair.

But take a look at the video of the supposed assault. It enters the scene a bit late -- an SEIU member is already on the ground and appears to be injured, but we can't tell what the cause was. As he's laying there, other SEIU members come to his protection, and one of them pulls down Gladney; both men fall to the pavement. Both quickly get back up. There appears to be little to it. [A section of the video showing the supposed assault is in slow motion.]

Indeed, it's readily apparent that Gladney seems completely unhurt. He wanders out to the crowd, chats with the cameraman, flags down a cop, and saunters back to where police decide to handcuff the man who knocked him down. As you can hear, the man protests that he was just keeping Gladney away from his fallen friend.

The next day, Gladney is at the press conference in a wheelchair. He claims to be too medicated to speak, so his lawyers and fellow tea partiers do it for him.

Does this seem real to you? Sure looks fake to me.

Right-wingers love to bring up cases of fake hate crimes and overblown racial-profiling claims as proof that these phenomena don't really exist to the extent that their victims claim. (See Ann Coulter for the most recent example, but Michelle Malkin has made a minor cottage industry out of this specious narrative.) But they sure do love it when a minority conservative can make a reverse-the-charges accusation (usually involving race) against liberals -- no matter how dubious the claims.

We can see, moreover, that the right-wing teabaggers intend to create as much physical provocation as possible and then claim victimhood when something erupts -- even when there's nothing. (See yesterday's history lesson for more on this.)

Even worse, this kind of nonsense creates permission for right-wingers to then indulge in the "defensive" violence we've read them fantasizing about on right-wing gun forums. You know, that "Second Amendment" threat we've been hearing.

At the end of the video, I've added a snip from a friend of Gladney's, who remarks: "I wish I'd been there with you, bro, it'd have turned out a lot different, I promise you."

That's what worries the rest of us.

The Service Employers International Union has vowed to help stand up against the GOP backed Astrobirthers who are being sent in to disrupt the town hall meetings of Democratic members of Congress. Since the union announced it's intentions, well-funded right wing groups and media outlets (see Fox News) have orchestrated call in campaigns accusing them of plotting violence against them -- one of the calls (audio and transcript in the video above) contained a not-so-veiled threat of armed violence:

One of the country's largest unions has been hit by a wave of hostile calls and even death threats from people upset with its involvement in town-hall health care debates.

The Service Employers International Union was, as one aide put it, "deluged" with calls on Friday after several conservative media outlets accused the organization of trying to assault demonstrators who had showed up to protest Obama's health care agenda. Making it even scarier for union employees, the address of the union's St. Louis headquarters was mentioned on air by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Callers who reached both the front desk and the communications department compared the union officials to Nazis, union aides say. On Twitter, organizers of the town hall protest urged people to take pictures and write down the license plate numbers of attending SEIU officials. More alarming than anything else, angry callers and protesters pledged to take up arms against the union. Read on...

I believe the time has come for Attorney General Eric Holder to get involved. Right wing violence is on the rise in America and the threat of bloodshed at the hands of a Fox News/GOP inspired extremist at one of these town hall meetings is real possibility.

In the last few days, there has been a significant shift in the political winds in Washington towards real health care reform, with a robust public health insurance option at its heart. The last thing we need is someone nay-saying that reform won't pass.

Why, then, is Senator Diane Feinstein doing just that, saying she's not sure reform is going to pass? She should help us make history, not stand in the way!

Sign the petition urging Feinstein to stand up for Californians and America.

Now, let's take a look at the landscape.

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ConsumerAffairs.com:

Under heavy fire from critics for the bank's losses in the economic meltdown, former Bank of America chairman Kenneth Lewis will step down as chairman, to be succeeded by Dr. Walter E. Massey. Lewis will remain as President and CEO.

All 18 board members were said to "comfortably" resist votes to remove them from the board, but the vote to split the duties of chairman into different posts was successful. Massey, an accomplished scientist and a member of many corporate governing boards, most recently served as president of his alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

The announcement came after a raucous shareholder meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina today, where investors and activists grilled him for pushing the acquisition of debt-riddled Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch, as well as for accepting billions in taxpayer money during the first round of bailouts of the financial market last year.

Countrywide, formerly the world's largest mortgage lender, was acquired last year by Bank of America for $4 billion amid rumors that it would seek bankruptcy protection due to mounting losses from the collapsing housing market. The additional acquisition of Merrill Lynch saddled the banking giant with an estimated $70 billion in capital losses, while shareholders saw their investments drop by an average of 76 percent.[..]

The Service Employees' International Union (SEIU) launched a campaign to remove Lewis as chairman, after it was revealed that Bank of America used $25 billion in taxpayer money it received for executive compensation and buyouts of competitors, while squeezing the credit lines of its customers.

SEIU actually liveblogged the shareholder's meeting and deserves all sorts of credit for really holding Lewis's feet to the fire.

I think Lewis should just be grateful that the shareholders didn't opt to treat him the way that Icelanders have treated the bankers that caused their financial crisis. Just sayin'...

Just like with the miracle flight landing by America's No. 1 hero, Chesley B. Sullenberger, union workers helped save the day on that incredible experience, the crew of the Maersk Alabama are also proud union workers, as they describe the ordeal on the high seas.

The American crew members of the Maersk Alabama - a ship recently hijacked by Somali pirates - regained control of the ship. The seamen specifically cite their union membership as a reason for how they were able to beat the pirates.

In an interview with NBC, the ship's Third Engineer, John Cronan, said this about their efforts:

"We are American seamen. We are union members. We stuck together, we did our jobs. And that's how we did it."

Isn't it interesting how only the CNBC/FOX new crowd continually bash unions? Big business has their mouthpieces all lined up in a row -- but heaven forfend we should hear from working men and women.

When guys like Bill O'Reilly -- guys with massive public megaphones -- unleash their venom on groups they hate (particularly liberal groups) they always want you to forget that they're in fact talking about mostly ordinary people who are every bit the "real American" Bill O'Reilly pretends to be.

So when O'Reilly let loose on the SEIU the other day -- calling them a "radical left" outfit bent on conspiring with George Soros to destroy capitalism -- he wasn't just attacking some big faceless union, he was describing its 12 million members that way too.

Today, some of those members released a video urging Bill O'Reilly to come spend a day in their shoes, and he might gain an appreciation for what it is the union actually does for them.

Not that O'Reilly would ever deign to respond. When you're a big giant "battleship," no one notices when you're chickens--t.

Bill O'Reilly seems convinced that President Obama is doomed to failure, largely because he's surrounded by "extremists of the far left" like the SEIU, who are the cause of the continuing stock-market declines. At least, that was his theory about the continuing non-performance of Wall Street in his Talking Points Memo segment last night:

O'Reilly: The truth is that far-left extremists are unleashed, and are going for the gold. Their code words are "social justice" and "shared sacrifice." "Social justice" means empowering the government to seize the assets of affluent Americans and redistribute them to the less well off. "Shared sacrifice" means punitive taxation on high-wage earners and corporations. Now, that of course is socialism.

I don't know about you, but it sounds to me like he's describing progressive taxation as "punitive" and taxation generally as "seizing the assets of affluent Americans." It's hard to tell when he starts spinning the dials on the O'Reilly Decoder Ring.

Leading the way is the radical-left Service Employees International Union, a huge supporter of Barack Obama, and a force that represents 2 million workers in the USA and Canada. That union, allied with George Soros and Miss Pelosi, is pushing for a dramatic change in America -- a change that would badly damage our capitalistic system, which these people feel is unjust. Very quietly, the SEIU is buying a lot of airtime.

Hmmmm. Could that yet-unspoken "change" that "would badly damage our capitalistic system" be the Employee Free Choice Act? O'Reilly never says. Or is it just ... socialism? Either way, it sounds pretty durned evil.

O'Reilly: OK. Seeing the danger, the Wall Street Journal editorialized today, and I quote, "The market has notably plunged since Mr. Obama introduced his budget last week, and that should be no surprise. The document was a declaration of hostility toward capitalists across the economy."

So, now we understand what's really happening in Washington. While President Obama may well be trying to fix the economy -- he has to if he wants to get re-elected -- he's also allowing radical elements of the Democratic Party to damage the economic core of America. That's why the economic pain is getting worse. Obama's not only facing a nasty recession, he's being battered by the far left, and unless he stands up to them, he and we will face dire consequences.

Ah, that explains it. It's not the complete gutting of the global economy by conservative governance that's causing the economy to continue to tank. Indeed, we can already judge, a mere two weeks out, the effectiveness of Obama's economic strategy by the mere fact that the stock markets continue the death spiral wrought by Republican malfeasance.

Corporate Republicans have gotten so used to having their way that the very intimation of a few old-fashioned progressive institutions -- like labor unions and a decently distributed tax burden -- are sending them into conniptions. I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Especially when labor unions become their big new bogeymen.

The rhetoric being used against the Employee Free Choice Act would be hilarious if it weren't replacing real debate with phoney end-of-the-world scenarios, backed up by such huge money and anti-worker influence. SEIU:

According to CEOs and their front groups, the fabric of our nation may well fall apart, all because of the Employee Free Choice Act. Its opponents no longer debate the merits of the bill, and instead resort to hyperbolic vitriol intended to inflame the public and press.

In reality, the Employee Free Choice Act is a bipartisan, common sense economic recovery for working families that will pump billions into our nation's economy.

Tell the phoney outraged powerbrokers what you think here.

This is good news from the SEIU, assuming Burger King has dropped their opposition permanently. It seems to be the result of a full week of SEIU actions at Burger Kings across the country :

Under pressure from SEIU activists and allies like Brave New Films, Jobs with Justice, and the Coalition for Social Justice this week, Burger King scrambled to respond to allegations that it lobbied against the Employee Free Choice Act while paying its workers poverty wages. In a statement issued Friday, Burger King apparently backed off its opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act:

"Burger King Corp. (BKC) believes unions serve a purpose in some workplaces and a number of its guests, vendors and franchisees have positive union membership experiences. BKC is not anti-union. BKC and its franchisees serve a diverse consumer base and, therefore, aim to remain neutral on political issues.

Now that it has recanted its opposition, we fully expect that Burger King will cease its expenditures on lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act and either withdraw from business associations that also oppose the bill, or demand that those groups also stop lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Burger King spent $319,648 lobbying against the proposed legislation between 2006 and 2008 and has helped fund the fight against the bill through its involvement in the National Retail Federation, one of the organizations behind an anti-employee free choice group called the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace.

Prominent Burger King shareholder Goldman Sachs is also involved in lobbying against workers' interests as a member of the Business Roundtable, which spent $15,849,000 on lobbying in 2008, including lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act.

You Tube

Lou Dobbs and Drew Griffin go after the SEIU and the Employee Free Choice Act in this anti-union hit job. Dobbs even manages to squeeze in a shot at Acorn at the end of the segment. He doesn't seem to have much use for our First Amendment and the right to peaceably assemble either.

DOBBS: A bold threat tonight from one of the most powerful unions in the country, a bold threat to democratic lawmakers and President Obama. The Service Employees International Union marching on Capitol Hill today, marching to demand that democrats pass the so- called employee free choice act. The Service Employees Union, which did help many democrats win election, including the president, said that those democrats must keep their promises or else. Drew Griffin with our report.

DREW GRIFFIN: The battle has been waged inside this Indianapolis office building for three years. But the fight at the corner of Illinois and Market Streets is about to spread to every Main Street in the U.S. This noisy protest by members of the service employees' international union is specifically about janitors, but nationally, it's about the employee free choice act.

DAVE BEGO, EMS OWNER: Check is real simple. They want to eliminate the secret ballot election.

GRIFFIN: Dave Bego says in his case, the workers don't want the union.

BEGO: They've been after us for almost three years. And they've only got 10 or 12 people interested in what they have to sell.

GRIFFIN: Bego runs EMS, a national janitorial service based in Indianapolis. He started it 20 years ago and has never been unionized. Its workers, at least those chosen to talk to us, say that's the way they want it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think the union, everybody needs a union, and unions are good, but with this company, we've been treated pretty fair and the work is good.

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