Late last week several leaders of the Right, including Tony Perkins, Edwin Meese, and Alfred Regnery issued a statement opposing the nomination of David Hamilton (currently the Chief Judge of the Southern District of Indiana) to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Among other things the statement recycles the screed working its way through the right wing blogoshpere that treats Hamilton's one-month job as a canvasser for ACORN thirty years ago when he was twenty two as if it constitutes a major portion of his career.  And it repeats the gross mischaracterization of a decision by Hamilton that police shouldn’t be allowed to violate “the privacy and sanctity of family relations” by directing a school social worker to interrogate a nine-year old student to get evidence against her mother.

And, now, for the first time as far as I’m aware, the statement levels charges that Hamilton ruled that prayers to Jesus Christ offered at the beginning of state legislative sessions were impermissible, but that prayers to Allah were not.

Of course, that’s not an accurate reading of Hamilton’s opinion. Rather, he concluded, as the Supreme Court has said, that “any official prayers [must] be inclusive and non-sectarian and not advance one particular religion.” And he found, based on an in-depth analysis of the record, that the official prayers being offered in the Indiana House in fact “repeatedly and consistently” advanced the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus, and as such, were impermissible. He also said that Muslim prayers that similarly advanced the Muslim faith were also impermissible, but that the one and only instance of a prayer being offered by a Muslim imam “was inclusive and was not identifiable as distinctly Muslim from its content.”

A debate on the merits of judicial nominees is perfectly appropriate. But let’s at least get the facts straight.

You've seen a lot on this site about the inflammatory campaign being waged by the McCain-Palin team and the RNC against ACORN.  It's a desperate political ploy to cast doubt on the integrity of the elections and to divert attention from the real problem:  voter suppression and intimidation  taking place across the country.  Check out this exccellent video from Brave New Films that tells this story.

And click here to read a letter from House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers and Subcommittee Chairs Jerrold Nadler and Linda Sanchez to Attorney General Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller asking for assurances that "the full weight of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be brought to bear" to protect the right to vote and the safety of citizens "who serve our democracy by educating, registering, and turning out voters."

I'm not going to sit idly by while good people are thrown under the bus ... especially if that bus is John McCain's "Straight Talk Express." And I am not -- I repeat, NOT -- going to let the Right steal another election by demonizing community organizers while doing all they can to disenfranchise voters.

That's why People For the American Way is not taking the attacks on ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) lying down, and we're not going to let the Right's latest distraction work. We're taking out a full page ad in the New York Times to tell the truth about ACORN, the myth of "widespread voter fraud" and the actual voter suppression being perpetrated by the Right. Check out the ad and find out what you can do to help with these efforts at www.PFAW.org/ACORN.

ACORN has tirelessly worked to uplift the less fortunate and advocated for improved housing, a fair and living wage, and yes, continues to fight to give a voice to the underserved by promoting civic engagement and voter empowerment. John McCain used to know that but he seems to have forgotten.

During Wednesday's presidential debate, McCain was again over the top, saying ACORN "may be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." No, Senator McCain, the fraud is GOP attempts to challenge the registrations of eligible voters who are on the verge of losing their homes to foreclosure ... the fraud is right-wing efforts to purge thousands of eligible voters from the voter rolls ... the fraud is the long history of your party's attempts to resurrect Jim Crow.

Let's set the record straight. ACORN plays by the rules, but they register voters the Right would rather exclude, so they are a perfect target in the ongoing effort to stoke paranoia over so-called "widespread voter fraud" (a proven myth). Out of the 13,000 field workers ACORN hired in its drive to register hundreds of thousands of voters, a small fraction submitted inappropriate registration cards. In most cases, ACORN was required by law to submit these incorrect forms, along with the valid forms, to election officials, and in most cases, the incorrect forms had been flagged for officials by ACORN as problematic. But bad registration forms don't add up to "voter fraud."

The Bush administration has spent a good deal of time on fishing expeditions to find problems with groups like ACORN that register voters. In fact, they fired US Attorneys for refusing to participate in this partisan witch hunt.

Using "voter fraud" to distract from real voter suppression is nothing new. But it's still extremely troubling that the McCain-Palin campaign has decided to put party before country and not denounce the GOP's attempts to squash voter participation. I don't think the American people are buying any of this. But even if scapegoating ACORN doesn't work, the Right will have won if they are successful in getting people to look the other way on the real voter suppression in which they are aggressively engaged.

It's up to us to make sure the distraction doesn't work.

Anyone who watched last night’s debate should know that John McCain and his right-wing allies are going to outrageous lengths to smear the reputation of ACORN, a community organizing group which has registered hundreds of thousands of voters for the coming election. But many in the media – especially at Fox News and CNN – have failed the public.

People For the American Way is running a full-age ad (see below) in the New York Times in the coming days to call out the right-wing smears and the failure by many in the press to report the full story.

The truth is that there is no voter fraud problem. This is what the top election experts have consistently concluded. When Karl Rove aggressively pushed the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute voter fraud, they came up empty-handed. But all we seem to hear about from Fox and CNN is that Mickey Mouse was registered to vote.

There are already systems in place to catch petty voter registration fraud. It should be a non-issue. Meanwhile McCain and the RNC are using a handful of negligible but colorful examples to distract from the organized disenfranchisement of thousands, perhaps millions, of legally registered voters through so-called ballot security measures.

Learn more about those efforts here, read more about our ad here, and check out the ad here.

Ezra Klein points out how the right is using the ACORN pseudo-scandal to undermine the Obama presidency – before the election has even taken place.

Having (possibly? momentarily?) decided to back away from the anti-Obama character attacks that we thought we'd see over the last weeks of the campaign, the McCain campaign is now pushing the idea that the race is going to decided by voter fraud committed by the voter registration group ACORN.

To use a favorite word of a certain vice presidential candidate, that's pure malarkey.

As People For has often pointed out in the past, voter fraud is an almost entirely synthetic issue, cooked up as an excuse to push restrictive voter ID laws. (Voter ID laws, of course, lower turnout among communities of color, the elderly, students, and working class voters.)

In response to the accusations, ACORN has created a useful fact sheet which contains some surprisingly interesting information.

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.