ACORN's suit against James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles

File this under "mind-bogglingly stupid" ideas, said Patrick Edaburn in The Moderate Voice. ACORN has filed a lawsuit against filmmaker-activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles (and conservative website Breitbart.com, which posted their work) for secretly videotaping "various ACORN workers seemingly supporting the importation of underage sex slaves." Does ACORN really want to open its records to lawyers working for its enemies (watch an undercover video shot in an ACORN office)?

ACORN gets "points for chutzpah, I guess," said Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. But, with this ill-advised lawsuit, the community-organizing group is just "extending the news cycle on this whole debacle, making fools of themselves with transparently petty arguments, and just generally showing less common sense than your average mafia don caught on a 60 Minutes sting." When you're caught in the act, "shooting the messenger" is a bad idea.

Tell that to Barney Frank, said John McCormack in The Weekly Standard. The Democratic congressman from Massachusetts has asked the Congressional Research Service to look into the laws James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles may have broken by taping and distributing their undercover footage without the ACORN employees' consent. "Next thing you know, the sexual predators caught on MSNBC's To Catch a Predator will turn around and sue the journalists who exposed them."

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