Day: February 6, 2010

When it came to stunts, nothing was too gonzo for James O’Keefe.

The man who offered himself up as a pimp to set up activists at ACORN would do just about anything for the cause — as long as the cause was conservative and anti-liberal.

O’Keefe would set up bogus photo ops, brandish over-sized checks and even dress up in a chicken suit if it suited the purpose.

He produced a video, “Bailout Prize Patrol, on YouTube a year before his famous ACORN “pimp” undercover video.

Sometimes people laughed. Other times they called the cops, like the New Jersey bank branch manager who wasn’t amused when O’Keefe and four others conned her into posting for a photograph with an oversized check that was supposed to represent federal bailout funds.

A blizzard battered the Mid-Atlantic region on Saturday, quickly dumping large amounts of snow on that piled up on roadways and toppled trees onto apartment buildings and cars.

Officials urged people to huddle at home for the weekend, out of the way of crews trying to keep up with a storm that forecasters said could be the biggest for the nation’s capital in modern history. A father and son were killed in Virginia when a tractor-trailer struck and killed them after they stopped to help another driver.

Faced with record levels of red ink into the foreseeable future, Washington is spending $2.5 million to create buzz for the census — by advertising during the Super Bowl.

The Census Bureau is hoping to exploit the strong ratings from this annual attraction, aiming to get more participation from people who now seem disinclined to mail back a government questionnaire or even answer the door.

Census officials call it a good investment, saying the front-end costs of purchasing the ads can be quickly recouped if they succeed in encouraging people to mail back their census forms. A recent poll found nearly 1 in 5 residents said they may not fill them out, mostly because they were unfamiliar with the census or weren’t interested.