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Now welcome to the award-winning BestOfTheLeft podcast with Cook's Today, from the Rachel

Maddo Show, The Young Turks, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, The Jimmy Dora Show, and Countdown

with Keith Overman, with a bonus video clip for our iPhone app users from The Young Turks.

But we begin tonight with something that frankly we knew was coming. Something we knew was

inevitable after right-wing activists and Fox News destroyed the community organizing group

ACORN last year with supposedly incriminating videotapes that really weren't all that incriminating

at all. That really weren't incriminating at all. This is not meant to excuse what ACORN has done

wrong in the past, but the huge tide of negative publicity that followed these videotapes and the

coverage they got on Fox wall-to-wall for months was bullpucky. It was a dishonest political stunt

that bears no resemblance to journalism and no resemblance to the actual facts of what happened

in those offices. But it worked. This organization has been shut down. Means be damned in the end

it worked. Who do you think is next on their list? Today we got an answer to that question,

which I hoped at the time was just a rhetorical one. The same attack that helped take down ACORN

last fall with supposedly incriminating videotapes has now claimed a new victim. Next on their list,

it turns out is this woman, an Obama administration employee named Shirley Sherrod. Up until

yesterday, Shirley Sherrod wasn't official with the United States Department of Agriculture with

the USDA. She served as the USDA's world development director for the great state of Georgia.

Ms. Sherrod resigned from that post yesterday. She claims under intense pressure from the Obama

administration, pressure that was apparently brought to bear after this. The same conservative website

that posted the supposedly incriminating, but in the end just massively misleadingly edited

...