Palm Trees Come To Cleveland: FreedomWorks Uses Discredited Footage

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Palm Trees Come To Cleveland: FreedomWorks Uses Discredited Footage In New Ohio Anti-Union Ad

FreedomWorks, a right-wing group bankrolling the Tea Party, has a new advertisement it is planning to run in Ohio supporting Gov. John Kasich’s union-busting efforts. The advertisement tries to paint union protesters in Ohio as violent thugs. One problem: the ad uses footage from an old union protest in California.

How do we know? This is the same footage from California, which features palm trees, that was used by Bill O’Reilly just days ago. He used it to argue that the protesters in Wisconsin were violent thugs. Here’s the video evidence produced by TP’s Jeff Spross:

video at link
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/18/freedomworks-ad-palm-trees/

Bill O’Reilly’s stunt inspired Wisconsin protesters to mockingly carry inflatable palm trees in Madison:



The larger point is that these protests have been remarkably peaceful, which forces the right to distort the truth.