Stop Falling for Distractions

Miss California will keep her crown for now and Donald Trump will announce Tuesday if she'll keep her title. The state beauty pageant has been investigating whether she violated her contract by failing to reveal that she posed in her underwear as a teenager.

But while most of the media will be showing you racy pictures of this woman even as they talk about how awful they are, the one thing they won't talk about is the truth: The pictures are simply another example of misdirection.

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Miss California's crown isn't at stake over the photo, but rather for having the same position as President Obama on gay marriage.

How could she be such a hate-monger?

She's not. It's misdirection: Make people look at the hatemonger and her hot pictures while a real agenda plays out unnoticed.

It's the same thing with ACORN, the community organizing group that became notorious for voter registration fraud allegations during the 2008 election. Everyone wants to focus on politics and make this out to be a left-right issue.

I guess the idea is that when people are outraged about a Las Vegas registrar saying he believes that almost half of ACORN's registration forms are fake or about the ongoing ACORN fraud investigations in 14 states, it's only because they're bitter about John McCain losing to ACORN's old pal Barack Obama. It has nothing to do with the rule of law or free and fair elections — it's just about politics.

But that's just noise; it's misdirection.

So while the right hand plays games, what's the left hand doing? In case you missed it, here's what happened on Friday:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAREN INMAN, FIRED ACORN BOARD MEMBER: The organization, I think, had a good message to begin with and then they looked to see how much money they generated and how much power they got. And so, instead of having it trickle down — trickle up from the membership, which is what it is supposed to be, they've looked and said, "Hmm, we can get X amount of dollars here. We'll convince our membership that this is what we should be working on."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

In other words, the left hand is counting the money.

ACORN and other activist groups are eligible to apply for $2 billion in federal funds to redevelop abandoned and foreclosed homes. Of course, if you think about it only as left-right, you could play that off as just a thank you from the Obama administration — the main beneficiary of their efforts.

But that's not all this is about. ACORN is also deeply tied to the powerful SEIU, the Service Employees International Union.

On ACORN's own Web site, SEIU Locals 100 and 880 are identified as allied organizations; the Department of Labor also has financial disclosure forms showing $600,000 in transactions between just those two ACORN groups and the SEIU, other similar filings show that organized labor has kicked back a total of $2.4 million to ACORN.

Given that SEIU donated $33 million to President Obama's campaign and also spent a lot of money supporting other Democrats around the country, would you be shocked to hear that the administration sides with them in important issues?

For example, the California governor's office was reportedly informed that trimming $74 million in worker pay could cost the state its $6.8 billion in stimulus money. Where I come from, that's not "informing" that's "extorting."

But why was the SEIU even at the table in the first place? For the same reason that ACORN is also helping out with the 2010 Census: The SEIU, ACORN and the Obama administration are all about money and power and they're all in it together.

It's not about left and right, it's about right and wrong and you'll only see that clearly once we all stop falling for the distractions of those who just want control.

— Watch "Glenn Beck" weekdays at 5 p.m. ET on FOX News Channel