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Bill Berkowitz
May 5, 2008
Two longtime practitioners of negative campaigning are mainstreaming attacks on Clinton and Obama
Floyd Brown and David Bossie have spent a good part of their political careers making life miserable for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Unlike Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire financier who was unremitting in his efforts to take the Clintons down during the latter part of the twentieth century and whose newspaper endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton prior to the Pennsylvania primary, neither Brown nor Bossie have had a pro-Hillary conversion.
These days, however, Brown's new organization, The National Campaign Fund -- which launched a new website "ExposeObama.com" -- and Bossie's Citizens United have added Sen. Barack Obama to the mix.
Brown recently told Time magazine that "he had established several other front groups to fund a long-range effort to erode Obama's support, including a second PAC, called The Legacy Committee, a 527 organization called Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America and a so-called "social welfare" 501(c)4 nonprofit called the Policy Issues Institute."
Bossie told Newsweek that he was "assembling material for TV spots about Obama's ties with [Bill] Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War."
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Bill Berkowitz
April 28, 2008
'J Street,' a new liberal Jewish organization, hopes to challenge AIPAC's influence over U.S.-Israeli affairs
In its entry on the "The Little Engine That Could," Wikipedia notes that "the moralistic children's story ... is used to teach children the value of optimism." Like the little engine that could, "J Street," a new organization made up of prominent U.S. and Israeli Jews that hopes to shift the debate over the Middle East and U.S.-Israeli policy away from the conservative positions espoused by the mighty American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and towards a pro-peace position, must recognize that it has a huge hill to climb.
And one part of climbing that hill will be to redefine what it means to be "pro-Israel," a term that conservative Jewish and evangelical Christian organizations have claimed for their own.
"For too long, the loudest American voices on Israel have come from the far right," noted Jeremy Ben-Ami, a founder and director of both J Street, chartered as a 501(c)(4) organization, and its political-action affiliate, JStreetPac, a political action committee focusing on campaign funding.
"Those voices have claimed that the only way to be pro-Israel is to support military responses to political problems, to refuse to engage one's adversaries in dialogue and to put off the day of reckoning when hard compromises will be required to achieve a peaceful and secure future for Israel and the entire Middle East," he told reporters via teleconference in mid-April.
"These are not the kind of smart, tough views that serve the long-term interests of the state of Israel, of the United States -- or frankly, the American Jewish community," Ben-Ami, until recently, senior vice president in the Washington office of Fenton Communications, added.
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Bill Berkowitz
April 16, 2008
House resolution congratulates the TCC and its supporters for their key role in promoting and ensuring recognition of the Ten Commandments as the "cornerstone of Western law"
Did you know that for the past two years, Congress has designated the first weekend in May as "Ten Commandments Weekend (TCW)?" Most of us pay little attention to congressional resolutions. All sorts of resolutions are proposed; some pass, others are tabled, and still others are withdrawn.
These days, two resolutions relating to the Ten Commandments are being considered by Congress; one will again designate the first weekend in May as "Ten Commandments Weekend," while the other aims to celebrate the Ten Commandments Commission (TCC), an organization led by a former veteran of the Israeli Armed Forces, and made up of a host longtime conservative evangelical Christian leaders.
For months, Chris Rodda, a Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), has been following developments surrounding the two Ten Commandments resolutions -- Senate Resolution 483 and House Resolution 598.
The Senate Resolution, introduced by Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback -- with Connecticut Independent Joseph Lieberman as its co-sponsor -- aims to once again recognize the first weekend in May as "Ten Commandments Weekend."
According to Rodda, the author of "Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History -- Volume I," Brownback's resolution comes packed with 10 Whereas' starting of with: "Whereas the Ten Commandments are precepts foundational to the faith of millions of Americans," "Whereas the Ten Commandments are a declaration of fundamental principles for a fair and just society," and "Whereas, from the founding of the United States, the Ten Commandments have been part of America's basic cultural fabric," followed by quotes from Presidents George Washington, John Quincy Adams, and Harry Truman.
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Bill Berkowitz
April 3, 2008
Funded by wealthy Republican Party donors and former White House officials, the group may be accomplishing less than it claims
The hiring of Carl Forti, the former political director for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's failed presidential run and hardball flinging spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), appeared to signal that Freedom's Watch is getting ready to gear up for Election 2008. However, will recent defections from the group, and reported questions about the actual existence of the $250 million war chest that Freedom's Watch's leaders have boasted about, slow its operation down?
On top of these questions, two well-connected conservative insiders, commenting on the condition of anonymity, raised their own questions about whether Freedom's Watch's rhetoric might be outpacing its actual accomplishments.
In late March, Freedom's Watch, the group founded by former White House staffers and funded by a host of very wealthy longtime Republican donors, announced that Forti, one of the GOP's premier hatchet men, will serve as its Executive Vice President and head up "the group's issue advocacy campaign in the fall."
Earlier in the month, Bradley Blakeman, a co-founder of Freedom's Watch and a former deputy assistant to Bush, stepped down as president of the organization. Blakeman's departure came soon after he sent out an email fundraising appeal which in part claimed that Freedom's Watch was "the only group capable of going toe-to-toe with George Soros and this Left-Wing juggernaut."
Blakeman boasted of Freedom's Watch's victory over MoveOn.org, allegedly beating them "at their own game (taking down The New York Times in the process!). In fact, we've been so successful that former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville proclaimed Freedom's Watch a grave danger to the Left's radical agenda. We'll take that as a compliment."
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Bill Berkowitz
March 27, 2008
The old guard is wondering if 'the younger generation will heed the call' while the young Turks have other things on their minds besides abortion and same-sex marriage
During a recent appearance at the National Religious Broadcasters conference, Dr. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, expressed deep concern about the future of the conservative Christian movement he helped build. "The question is," Dobson said, "will the younger generation heed the call? Who will defend the unborn child in the years to come? Who will plead for the Terri Schiavos of the world? Who's going to fight for the institution of marriage, which is on the ropes today?"
Dobson pointed out that the deaths of such revered evangelical leaders including the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Dr. D. James Kennedy and Ruth Graham Bell "represent the end of an era." The radio talk show host "noted that others like Billy Graham, Chuck Colson, Pat Robertson and Chuck Swindoll will also soon pass from the scene, and questioned the impact on the conservative Christian church," the Associated Press reported.
"Who in the next generation will be willing to take the heat, when it's so much safer and more comfortable to avoid controversial subjects?" Dobson said. "What will be the impact on the conservative Christian church when the patriarchs have passed?"
In New York City on a recent mid-March weekend, The Nation magazine's "Left Forum 2008," featured a panel moderated by Esther Kaplan titled "Is the Christian Right Dead?" Promotional materials read: "The coalition between economic and social conservatives seems kind of rocky coming out of the Bush Presidency that brought them together. Is the Christian Right dead?"
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Bill Berkowitz
March 14, 2008
After seven years both Democratic presidential candidates express support for and reservations about Republican religious patronage system
The seventh anniversary of President George W. Bush's Faith Based Initiative passed quietly. Unlike the much ballyhooed launching of his faith-based initiative in January 2001, when a string of religious officials witnessed Bush sign executive orders bringing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) into existence, this year the president was apparently occupied by more pressing matters; convincing the public that a recession wasn't looming, trumpeting so-called successes of the surge in Iraq, and no doubt wondering what else he's going to be doing until its time to scurry back to Texas next January.
Interestingly enough, as Sarah Pulliam recently reported for Christianity Today, while none of the three major presidential candidates have "unveiled a specific plan for the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives," Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain, and Democratic Party hopefuls Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama "have each voiced support for federal funding of faith-based social services."
Obama told Christianity Today that he wants to take a look at the program before deciding how to deal with it: "One of the things that I think churches have to be mindful of is that if the federal government starts paying the piper, then they get to call the tune," Obama said. "I want to see how monies have been allocated through that office before I make a firm commitment [to] sustaining practices that may not have worked as well as they should have."
Burns Strider, Clinton's director of faith-based outreach, "said that if she were elected, Clinton would continue funding faith-based organizations, but would seek to maintain an appropriate boundary between church and state," Christianity Today reported. "Clinton emphasizes a 'fair and level playing field' for faith-based and secular providers of social services, Strider said."
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Bill Berkowitz
March 5, 2008
Heartland Institute and dozens of other sponsors of conference funded by Coors, Bradley, Walton, Scaife and DeVos foundations
"Ignored, and often even censored and demonized" is how the promotional materials for the Heartland Institute's recent conference "The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change," described the way "distinguished scholars from the U.S. and around the world," that have had the courage to question global warming, have been treated by environmentalists and the mainstream media. In a "Background" piece, conference organizers claimed that "They [the scholars] have been labeled 'skeptics' and even 'global warming deniers,' a mean-spirited attempt to lump them together with Holocaust deniers.
Always on the lookout to defend the oppressed, both Glenn Beck, the right wing host of a CNN Headline News show, and the Fox News Channel rode in to rescue the "demonized" and beleaguered. On Monday morning, March 3, "Fox and Friends" homed in on the problem that the "skeptics" are facing. Fox's point: Goreistas, or advocates of devoting major resources to dealing with global warming, receive a disproportionate share of network and cable television face time, while those raising questions about global warming are shut out of the debate.
However, according to Think Progress, the conference was not ignored by the mainstream, media. "....The New York Times has published two separate articles on the conference, and the Times' John Tierney has written about it on his blog. Other mainstream press outlets that have covered the conference: the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, the New York Sun, and Reuters."
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Bill Berkowitz
March 3, 2008
Washington, D.C.-based tax-exempt "non-partisan" Republican think tank celebrating three-plus decades of saying no to government and yes to privatization, deregulation, wars, intervention and 'traditional family values'
President Bush opened a recent speech at the Heritage Foundation about the "War on Terror" by acknowledging that while he had only 14 months left in his presidency he was going to be "sprinting to the finish line." Bush complained about the Senate being slow to confirm Michael Mukasey for attorney general, urged Congress to make the Protect America Act permanent, and blasted "MoveOn.org bloggers" and "Code Pink protesters." He wrapped up his speech by saying he believed a president of the United States will come to the Heritage Foundation 50 years from now and say "Thank God that generation that wrote the first chapter in the 21st century understood the power of freedom to bring the peace we want."
Thirty-five years ago, when the Heritage Foundation first opened its doors, the War in Vietnam was finally winding its way toward a conclusion, Vice President Spiro Agnew had resigned in disgrace and President Richard Nixon, enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, would soon follow, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, was still not convinced that evangelicals should be deeply involved in the political process, the civil rights and the women's movements had won a number of transformative battles, having a social safety net was still a shared social value, privatization was a relatively little used term, and the "culture wars" had not yet punctured the national consciousness.
Historian Lee Edwards, in his book "The Power of Ideas," pointed out that "Conservative leaders and conservative ideas were out of public favor... In foreign [affairs], dètente was riding high ... [as Nixon] traveled to Communist China to kowtow to Mao Zedong."
Out of this conservative morass came -- among other things -- the Heritage Foundation, which helped lead the transformation from decades of liberalism to the past several decades of conservative hegemony. While Heritage wasn't the first conservative think tank -- the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Washington, D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute had been slogging along for years -- it was the first to be consciously embraced by a host of wealthy right-wing benefactors including beer magnate Joseph Coors and heir to the Mellon fortune, Richard Mellon Scaife, who had more on their minds than just churning out policy papers that few would read or heed. One of the ideological guides to the foundation's creation and early work was Paul Weyrich, now considered the "Godfather" of the New Right.
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Bill Berkowitz
February 21, 2008
Enmeshed in scandal, the university founded by, and named for televangelist Oral Roberts, is bailed out by Hobby Lobby's Mart Green
Before there was a Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Benny Hinn or Joel Osteen, Oral Roberts was televangelism. He, along with a few other pioneers brought the tent revival into the age of mass communications; Roberts was broadcast on numerous television stations across the country. He stalked the stage, raised his voice, and had the audience in the palm of his hands. He appeared to indicate that he had special powers; he could heal the sick, mend the wounded, comfort the afflicted.
Oral Roberts had wealth, power, prestige and an all-American family. He amassed a fortune and later established a university in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which he named Oral Roberts University (ORU).
Now, ORU needs some financial and spiritual healing.
That's where Mart Green, a young multi-millionaire, comes in.
Green, 46, recently gave ORU more than $60 million "of his family's fortune to rescue" the university, "the evangelical Christian school engulfed in a spending scandal [involving Oral Roberts' son Richard and his wife Lindsay] and burdened with tens of millions of dollars in debt," the Associated Press reported on February 5.
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Bill Berkowitz
February 6, 2008
Group founded to support Bush's surge in Iraq and encourage military action against Iran gearing up for November
In early December, Freedom's Watch, the well-funded conservative lobbying group founded by former White House staffers and extremely wealthy longtime Republican donors, fired its first shot in Election 2008. Founded last year, and making its public debut with a $15 million dollar advertising campaign in support of Bush's "surge" in mid-August, the group recently funded a series of ads in a northern Ohio special congressional election.
The advertisements, called "aggressively negative" by the Washington Post, branded the Democratic Party candidate as being soft on illegal immigration. According to the Post, "Behind a blood-red foreground, the group's ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and 'liberals in Congress' of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants."
Republican Robert Latta won the House seat representing the district around Bowling Green, Ohio.
"While initial reports suggested a budget of $200 million [for Freedom's Watch for the 2008 election cycle], people who have talked to the group in recent weeks say the figure is closer to $250 million, more than double the amount spent by the largest independent liberal groups in the 2004 election cycle," the Post reported.
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Bill Berkowitz
January 29, 2008
Christian Zionists organize to stymie any Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement that would divide Jerusalem while Netanyahu waits for Olmert's government to collapse
These are busy days for Christian Zionists. While President Bush recently returned from his trip to the Middle East "optimistic" that a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians could be reached by the end of the year, Pastor John Hagee's Christian United for Israel (CUFI) is setting forth plans to put the kibosh -- if not on the entire peace process -- on any agreement that would sanction the division of Jerusalem. And Dr. Mike Evans has launched a "Save Jerusalem Campaign” while Joel C. Rosenberg's Joshua Fund is planning a major celebration in Jerusalem in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.
CUFI, the pro-Israel lobbying group launched in February 2006 to provide support for Israel, believes that "'Jerusalem must remain undivided as the eternal capital of the Jewish people' (meaning no portion of it should be turned over to the Palestinians)," Sarah Posner, writes in her new book "God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters" (PoliPointPress, 2008).
Hagee, who heads up an 18,000-member Pentecostal congregation in San Antonio, Texas, "inject[s] ... the charged rhetoric of biblical prophesy into contemporary foreign policy," Posner writes, "[which] has catapulted him to the forefront of an American Christian Zionist movement that has become the darling of conservative Israel hawks in Washington and neoconservatives yearning for regional war in the Middle East."
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Bill Berkowitz
January 9, 2008
A conservative insider's take on the GOP presidential contest and the state of the conservative movement
Over the past few months, various Religious Right leaders have endorsed an assortment of Republican Party presidential candidates. Arizona Senator John McCain received the endorsement of Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican who is the leading voice for Christian conservatives in the Senate while former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was endorsed by longtime conservative activist Paul Weyrich and Bob Jones III, the president of the evangelical Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.
A host of religious right leaders including Janet Folger, president of Faith2Action, Rick Scarborough, founder and president of Vision America, the Rev. Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association and Tim and Beverly LaHaye, he the veteran activist and co-author of the wildly popular "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic novels, and the founder of Concerned Women for America are supporting former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
A while back, when Pat Robertson endorsed former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani -- the holder of pro-choice, pro-gay, and anti gun positions -- chaos broke out on the evangelical right. On conservative websites and blogs, charges and countercharges were hurled; Robertson, the once revered leader who had founded the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), was now being called irrelevant and characterized as a betrayer -- a hypocrite who would do anything to enhance his political power.
The Christian Right's inability to come together and back one presidential candidate underscores the reality that there are differences within the movement. The deaths in 2007 of longtime movement icons Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy, and the retirement of Robertson as CEO of CBN, is indicative of a movement in transition, and perhaps even turmoil.
Some in the media, and on the left, view these fault lines as symbolic of a major meltdown on the right. It has spurred the churning out of a series of pre-mature obituaries; stories gleefully detailing perceived -- and real -- rifts within the movement. Parts of the Traditional Media may conclude the Religious Right's days are numbered.
Rod Martin comes at it from a different perspective, that of a conservative insider. Relatively unknown outside conservative circles, Martin is a core movement insider.
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Bill Berkowitz
December 24, 2007
Christian men need to embrace their 'table-tipping' side, says Christian comedian and 'GodMen' founder Stine
Christian music brings in big-time money; the release, and subsequent box office successes of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ," and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," has made Hollywood sit up and take notice. There are Christian dating services, Christian investment companies, Christian real estate brokers, a Christian MySpace, Christian comic strips, Christian bloggers and even Christian comedians.
There are Christian men's groups -- remember the glory days of the Promise Keepers?
How about a Christian men's group headed by a conservative Christian comedian?
He's a raunchy, raw, Republican devoted to stamping out "political correctness," and he's got the chutzpah to claim on his website that he's "America's favorite conservative comedian" (there are a number of other conservative comedians out there). In 2004, he performed for "R: the Party," an event hosted by Jenna and Barbara Bush during the Republican National Convention in New York City.
Brad Stine is a Christian comedian who heads up a ministry that encourages men to let their manhood hang out. In 2004 Stine told the Fox News Channel that he was "a conservative comedian -- one of two known to exist in the Western hemisphere. I'm very pro-America, very patriotic. I use my time on stage to say how great the country is as opposed to saying how bad it is."
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Phil Wilayto
December 13, 2007
CNE Director and leading neocon Robert L. Woodson Sr. argues his $280,000-plus annual salary gives him credibility among inner-city youth.
This interview with Robert L. Woodson Sr., founder and national director of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE), first appeared in the September/October edition of the Richmond Defender, a bimonthly community newspaper published in Richmond, Virginia.
Woodson's operations are funded almost entirely by the right-wing Bradley Foundation. He's a longtime proponent of school vouchers. He's made a career out of dissing the civil rights movement and helping the Republican Party build a political base in the African-American community. Now he's poised to start an anti-violence program in the Richmond Public Schools -- with the encouragement of the city's mayor, police chief and school superintendent.
The CNE has applied to the U.S. Department of Justice for a grant to bring its Violence-Free Zone program to two Richmond schools. If the funding comes through, and the pilot program is successful, the CNE plans to solicit funding from Richmond-area foundations and corporations to expand the program to other schools. Mr. Woodson agreed to an interview, which the Defender conducted by telephone on Sept. 10, 2007. While we disagree philosophically with his stands on many issues, we agree wholeheartedly that poor people in general -- and poor Black people in particular -- have been largely abandoned by both liberals and conservatives. And we applaud his refusal to write off poor people, poor communities and especially poor youth. Here is Mr. Woodson, in his own words. We think you are going to be hearing a lot more from him, and soon.
DEFENDER - If you receive the federal grant, how large would the Violence-Free Zone program be in Richmond?
WOODSON - I've talked with [Richmond Police Chief Rodney Monroe] and [Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Deborah Jewell-Sherman] and they were talking about maybe one middle school and one high school. That's how we've done it in other cities. We've been doing it successfully for nine years in other cities. In Milwaukee, we started with three schools, now we have six. In Prince George County, (Md.,) we were in two schools for three years, now we're expanding to six. The superintendent there joined me in a presentation before the Business Roundtable to solicit funds to continue and expand. We're also in Atlanta, Dallas, Washington and Baltimore.
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Bill Berkowitz
December 11, 2007
Despite rumblings in the traditional press about a religious right 'crackup,' key conservative Christian organizations are bringing in 'more money than ever' says Americans United for Separation of Church and State
Over the past two-plus decades it has become fashionable for the traditional press to periodically pen the Religious Right's obituary. Or, if not an outright death notice, articles will appear that detail real, or perceived, rifts within the Religious Right -- Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani for example -- plus periodic contentiousness between the Religious Right and other elements of the Republican Party. The traditional media often conclude that the Religious Right's days are numbered.
While there are certainly differences within the leadership of the Religious Right over which candidate to support, it would be foolhardy to consider these differences irreconcilable.
Commenting on the rift within the Religious Right, NewsMax's Tom Squitieri recently wrote that Robertson's endorsement "created a schism among evangelical Republicans -- one that may cost the GOP the White House next year." Squitieri pointed out that a major backlash has been under way in the evangelical community over the endorsement."
People for the America Way's RightWingWatch recently picked up on the in-fighting within the Party as a whole theme, pointing to a piece "suggesting that moderate Republicans are growing increasingly weary of the stranglehold the Religious Right has had on the Republican Party for the last several years and that efforts by presidential candidates to pander to the likes of James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Pat Robertson are only alienating them further."
Scott Reed, who managed Republican Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, told the Wall Street Journal's John Harwood that there's "a sense that the leadership of the Republican Party is too beholden to a small group of self-appointed social conservative leaders."
As crunch time approaches for the GOP's presidential candidates, the jury is still out on which candidate the majority of so-called values voters will support. Some political observers have argued that since the leadership of the Religious Right had been at first reticent about supporting any of the candidates and more recently have been all over the map with their endorsements, the conservative evangelical vote will be divided and diluted, which could lead to a large number of disillusioned stay-at-homes come November of next year.
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Bill Berkowitz
December 6, 2007
Despite being forced to resign in disgrace as president of the World Bank and helping lead America into the biggest foreign policy disaster in history, Wolfie is still useful to the Bush administration
Last summer, when Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign as president of the World Bank because he obtained a high-paying promotion for his female companion, Shaha Riza, a Middle East expert at the bank, he was welcomed back with open arms by his old comrades at the Washington, D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute. Wolfowitz's retreat to the conservative philanthropy sponsored think tank that has placed dozens of its staffers within the Bush administration gave him the opportunity to await an opening to rejoin his comrades in government.
In early December, Wolfowitz's time for public service came round again. Now, the former deputy defense secretary who was one of the chief architects of the Iraq war, will apparently be serving under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
According to several media reports, Wolfowitz has been offered a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board -- formerly known as the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board -- a prestigious State Department panel. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. Wolfowitz will replace former senator Fred Thompson, who quit over the summer to run for the Republican Party's presidential nomination.
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Bill Berkowitz
November 28, 2007
Two rejected Republican politicians form new "grassroots" organization aiming to challenge Democrats and regain control of Congress
When he was not out bashing the leadership of the Republican Party, expressing a desire to "bitch-slap" New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, attending David Horowitz's annual Restoration Weekend, promoting his book "No Retreat, No Surrender," or claiming he no longer is interested in holding public office, Tom DeLay made time to meet up with Ken Blackwell and found a new "grassroots" organization aimed at retaking congress in next year's elections.
The disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) who is waiting to stand trial on a number of charges, and former Ohio Secretary of State Kennneth Blackwell who is currently a Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., a contributing writer for Townhall.com and is the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow for Public Policy at Ohio's Buckeye Institute, have launched The Coalition for a Conservative Majority (CCM).
According to the Washington Times, the CCM "will establish chapters in all 50 states, which will be used to lobby lawmakers, coordinate political messages and influence members of the press."
"Right now, liberals are better organized, funded and active than I have ever witnessed," DeLay said. "Our goal is to work with the talented leaders of the conservative movement to complement their efforts, using an army of activists to push for the policies and leadership conservatives are begging for."
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Bill Berkowitz
November 19, 2007
The former head of FEMA who gave America "Brownie" and helped disembody the agency will be senior advisor on homeland security issues
On October 30, Joseph Allbaugh was named Senior Advisor to Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. According to a Giuliani campaign press release, Allbaugh "will advise the campaign on general strategy and homeland security."
"Rudy Giuliani is the only candidate who will keep America on offense in the Terrorists' War on Us," the press release quoted Allbaugh as saying. "The leadership he showed after 9/11 was an inspiration not only to New Yorkers but to the country. He knows what it takes to keep America safe, and as President, he will ensure that our country never goes back on defense in this war."
Giuliani said that the two of them had "worked closely together in the aftermath of 9/11 to ensure that everything possible was being done to help victims and their families. He has significant experience in emergency management and I will look to him for sound advice and expertise."
The Politico reported that "The endorsement is valuable ... because it gives the former New York mayor additional entrée to the Bush-Cheney organization. Allbaugh was one-third of the 'Iron Triangle' of Allbaugh, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, the powers-that-be in the president's original Austin-based presidential campaign."
Both Giuliani and Allbaugh are disaster profiteers.
"Giuliani himself has parlayed his own fame in connection with 9/11 into lucrative consulting deals with his own private security firm," Sheldon Rampton, Research director with the Center for Media and Democracy told Media Transparency in an e-mail exchange.
In addition, media reports have pegged his earnings from speeches about the threat of terrorism at more than $10 million.
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Bill Berkowitz
November 5, 2007
Named nation's 'greediest executive' by Fortune magazine in 1999 and recently identified by Beliefnet as the tenth most powerful Christian in Hollywood, Anschutz is bringing faith-based movies to the nation's cineplexes
He's a Denver, Colorado-based billionaire whose net worth was recently tabbed by Forbes magazine at $7.6 billion; his corporate holdings include the nation's largest movie theater chain, Regal Entertainment, some of the world's most prominent sports and entertainment venues, and a stack of professional sports teams including the National Hockey League's Los Angeles Kings and several soccer teams including the Los Angeles Galaxy. He heads Clarity Media Group, which owns the Examiner chain of free conservative-leaning newspapers.
The native-born Kansan made his first fortune in the oil business before moving into railroads and then telecommunications. In 2005, Waldon Media, his Hollywood production company -- in partnership with Walt Disney Pictures -- released "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," a $200 million dollar film adapted from C.S. Lewis' children's book of the same title. "The Chronicles" has earned more than $700 million worldwide.
The vast majority of Americans have never heard of him -- which is just the way he prefers it.
He's Philip Anschutz and he's dead set on on transforming Hollywood and the American cultural landscape. "Hollywood as an industry can at times be insular and doesn't at times understand the market very well," he told an audience at the conservative Hillsdale College in 2004. I "saw a chance with this move to attempt some small improvement in the culture," he explained.
And he is clearly making his mark. In mid-October, Variety reported that Waldon Media was "set to unleash seven pics during the next year aimed squarely at the moviegoing demographic that Disney used to own: kids and families."
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Bill Berkowitz
October 29, 2007
The U.S. Forest Service 'is experiencing confusion and drift in its central identity and direction, and ambiguity in the way it allocates power and responsibility,' a recent survey of Forest Service workers found
At about the same time University of Florida student Andrew Meyer was getting tasered by overly heated campus security guards during an appearance by Sen. John Kerry, TASER International Inc. announced that it had received an order from the United States Forest Service for 700 TASER (r) X26 electronic control devices and related accessories.
"We are excited about this new additional federal agency purchasing TASER technology to protect life," said Tom Smith, Chairman and Founder of TASER international, a market leader in advanced electronic control devices. "Traditionally, we have focused law enforcement sales at the local and state level, but we are now seeing acceptance of TASER technology at various federal law enforcement agencies."
John C. Twiss, director of the service's law-enforcement branch, said that after years of studying the devices, it would give its 700 officers, who police 153 national forests, "an option other than deadly force in certain law-enforcement situations."
Is the Forest Service expecting an influx of anti-war protesters? Will the tasers be used against environmentalists protesting excessive logging? Are the animals in the wild in for some stunning surprises?
"The Forest Service will likely justify this order by saying that the forests are a dangerous place filled with marijuana growers, meth lab workers and illegal aliens," Scott Silver, the executive director of Wild Wilderness, an Oregon-based grassroots environmental organization, said in an e-mail interview.
"I'd say that the Forest Service is simply looking to further build up its police capabilities and to be better positioned to act violently, albeit non-lethally, when it feels justified in so doing," Silver pointed out.
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Bill Berkowitz
October 17, 2007
After successfully holding the line on Congressional support for the surge in Iraq, wealthy Bush backers are turning their attention and money to drumming up support for military action against Iran
If the U.S. undertakes military action against Iran, you can credit such longtime neoconservatives as Norman Podhoretz, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen and the swarm of ideologues buzzing about Washington's right wing think tanks. You can also credit Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United for Israel, a Christian Zionist outfit with unbending support for Israel. And credit also the billionaire and multimillionaire founders of Freedom's Watch for helping smooth the way.
Later this month, Freedom's Watch will sponsor a forum of some 20 experts on "radical Islam" that, according to a front page story in the New York Times, "is expected to make the case that Iran poses a direct threat to the security of the United States."
The forum is being "organized with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, DC-based neoconservative think tank, and it is 'private,'" John Stauber the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, told Media Transparency. "The fact that Freedom's Watch has been discussing it with the New York Times appears to be a great teaser to keep the press interested in who will be there, what will be discussed, etc."
"This in itself is a public relations ploy; they don't need to announce a private forum, they can hold one any time they want," Stauber pointed out. "But they want to keep the organization in the media spotlight and look significant and important from a policy perspective."
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Bill Berkowitz
October 15, 2007
Deal Hudson, who was forced to resign from the Bush administration's Catholic Project and editorship of Crisis magazine in 2004, is now handing out advice to the Christian right from his perch at The Morley Institute for Church and Culture
Deal Hudson recently handed out some advice to Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson; don't paint yourself into a corner regarding the Republican Party's top tier presidential candidates. Two days after a group of Christian conservative leaders met in Salt Lake City to discuss the possibility of supporting a third party candidate -- should former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani become the GOP standard-bearer -- Hudson wrote a piece suggesting that Dobson, by nixing Giuliani, Senator John McCain, and former Senator Fred Thompson, and being less than enamored with former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, was leaving himself few viable candidates to choose from.
While acknowledging that Dobson's "political pronouncements carry a lot of weight among Christian voters," Hudson claimed that Dobson's "comments, covering all of the GOP presidential candidates, threaten to divide and marginalize Christians in the upcoming election."
"The dilemma for Dobson is simple," Hudson wrote in "Will Dr. James Dobson Damage the Christian Vote?" : "He has disavowed every GOP hopeful except Newt Gingrich. With Gingrich now saying he will not run, there's no one left Dobson can support."
Since Dobson gave Gingrich "a second chance" to explain himself on his radio program, Hudson suggests that Dobson consider "offer[ing] the other candidates a chance to explain positions troubling to him and his listeners?"
A few years ago, Hudson's words would have garnered press attention and might have even made it onto Dobson's desk. Now, they're languishing on an obscure website called InsideCatholic.com.
Are there any arrows left in Deal Hudson's quiver? Will he play a role in the 2008 elections?
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Bill Berkowitz
October 5, 2007
Despite an architect being chosen, money being raised, and Karl Rove in the mix, opponents claim that it can still be stopped
President Bush may think it's a done deal, and First Lady Laura may be measuring for drapes. An architect has been chosen, and the project is proceeding to raise $500 million. And Karl Rove, who actually may be running the entire show, is also likely lining up a host of conservative think-tankers. Much of the media that covered the story only a few months ago appear to have lost interest. However, before the George W. Bush Library, with its attached public policy institute, are built at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, they must overcome rising objections within the nationwide United Methodist community.
On September 24, the Dallas Morning News reported that "Officially, no decision has been made on where the presidential library will be located, but SMU has long been considered the prohibitive favorite. An architectural firm was chosen last month to design the project."
Earlier in the month, the Reverend Andrew J. Weaver, an ordained United Methodist minister and research psychologist living in New York City (who also writes for this website), and one of the organizers of the campaign to keep the Bush Library off the SMU campus, sent an "Open Letter" to the more than 10,000 signers of a petition urging them to keep working to make SMU a Bush-free zone.
On September 25, opponents of the Bush Library and think tank issued a press release calling on the United Methodist Church "to deny approval to Southern Methodist University to host the Bush complex."
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Bill Berkowitz
September 29, 2007
Platform to be based on former speaker's notion that US is already in Word War III against the 'Forces of Islam,' which requires a reexamination of the First Amendment
UPDATE: The Washington Post reported on 9/29: "Gingrich Says No to White House Bid." From the Post: "Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will not run for president in 2008 after determining he could not legally explore a bid and remain as head of his tax-exempt political organization, a spokesman said Saturday."
When Fred Thompson rode his "Law and Order" pickup truck into the crowded GOP presidential field a few weeks back, he was expected to be greeted as the man who would appeal to the Religious right and would bring all factions of the party together. However, less than a month into the action, Thompson has been roundly dissed by Focus on the Family's James Dobson, and reviews from the campaign trail have been decidedly lukewarm.
Thompson's lackluster performance -- and recent trashing by Dobson -- leaves an opening for another well-known candidate. Fasten your seat belts, here comes Newt Gingrich.
Although the disgraced former House Speaker's personal peccadilloes might not sit well with many on the religious right, Gingrich, who was forced to relinquish his House post over a series of ethical missteps, did try to mend fences with religious conservatives earlier this year by apologizing for his behavior on Dobson's radio program.
For months Gingrich has been coyly sitting on the sidelines as the battle for the presidential nomination unfolded. Now the man who engineered the Republican Revolution of 1994 appears ready to step into a role that he undoubtedly feels comfortable with: savior of the Republican Party.
According to the Washington Times, Gingrich will soon begin "to seek financial commitments from donors."
"If he can get pledges for $30 million over the next three weeks, he will join the Republican presidential-nomination race -- a prospect he had been downplaying until yesterday," the newspaper reported.
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Bill Berkowitz
September 23, 2007
Catholic voters migrated back to the Democrats in the 2006 midterm elections. Was it a temporary move or are they heading home for the long term?
In the 2004 presidential election cycle, Catholics, whose vote was considered open to both parties, were carefully courted by the Republicans. GOP organizers -- accompanied by their neoconservative Catholic brethren -- brought the "traditional family values" mantra to the table, highlighting supposed agreement between Catholics and conservative evangelical Christians on two major issues -- abortion and same-sex marriage.
In the actual election, Republican George W. Bush wound up receiving 52 percent of the Catholic vote, up from 47 percent in 2000, to John Kerry's 47 percent.
In 2006, however, Catholics, who compose a 67 million-person slice of the electorate, favored Democrats by 55 percent to 45 percent, according to National Election Pool exit polls. Jeff Diamant of Religion News Service reported that "Catholic voting patterns varied by state, but the overall shift helped Democrats in several big states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to John Green, a senior fellow at Washington's Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life."
"For much of the 20th century, American Catholics were loyal Democrats, but in recent elections their voting patterns have been largely indistinguishable from the general population," Diamant pointed out. "And for the last quarter-century, conservative Catholics and white evangelicals have increasingly voted Republican, making opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage their top political issues."
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Bill Berkowitz
September 12, 2007
A well-connected California Republican law firm is pushing a ballot initiative that would split the state's Electoral Votes according to Congressional districts won
Election chicanery -- aka voter fraud --is as American as lead-laden Mattel toys, air polluting "clean skies" initiatives, and closeted Republican Party politicians. In recent years, GOP partisans have cleansed voter rolls of legitimate voters; hatched schemes to disenfranchise thousands of minority voters; mastered the art of push polls and robo calls, and supported the use of voting machines with no paper trail.
While counting votes has on occasion become more art than science in recent years, a new ballot initiative being pushed by California Republicans would apportion the state's electoral votes according to congressional districts won, instead of the current winner-take-all system. Only two small states, Nebraska and Maine, allow the splitting of electoral votes, although in practice a division has never happened. In recent years Democrats have had a near lock on California's 55 Electoral Votes.
A high-powered California-based Republican Party-connected legal outfit with ties to a Texas homebuilder/GOP donor who gave significant amounts of money to finance attacks on Democrat John Kerry's Vietnam War record in the 2004 presidential campaign is promoting the ballot initiative called the Presidential Electors Initiative.
According to the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, "one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento [has] quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California's electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district."
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Bill Berkowitz
September 7, 2007
Conservative philanthropy product Connerly launching 'Super Tuesday for Equal Rights' -- a series of November 2008 anti-affirmative action initiatives
In the aftermath of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling severely limiting the use of race in K-12 integration plans, Ward Connerly is feeling his oats. "I believe that we are now poised for a coup de grâce to say that race preferences in the eyes of the public should not be used," Connerly, the chairman of the Sacramento, California-based American Civil Rights Institute, said in response to the Supreme Court's decision.
If Connerly's new Super Tuesday for Equal Rights campaign is successful, the day after the November 2008 presidential election affirmative action will be one giant step closer to oblivion. The mastermind behind anti-affirmative action initiatives in California, Michigan, and Washington, has set his sights on five new states -- Missouri, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. "This is going to be Super Tuesday for equal rights," Connerly said. "I think it's very clear that we are witnessing an end to an era."
In 1997, Connerly along with Thomas 'Dusty' Rhodes, co-founded the American Civil Rights Institute (website), a national non-profit organization pro-actively opposed to affirmative action. Connerly rocketed into the national spotlight -- and the hearts of conservatives -- with Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that outlawed race and gender preferences in state hiring and university admissions.
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Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq.
August 31, 2007
The strange saga of the United Methodist Church's $20 million and Surgeon General Nominee James Holsinger
Dr. James W. Holsinger, President George W. Bush's nominee for Surgeon General has been a controversial figure in the United Methodist Church (UMC) for decades. He was elected through the efforts of a well-organized group of activists, along with two other conservatives, to the church's Judicial Council ("supreme court") in May, 2000, which gave the Council a rightwing majority. Holsinger has been the President ("chief justice") of the Judicial Council since 2004. During the years that Holsinger has been on the Council, a number of unprecedented and divisive rulings have been made.
While Holsinger has been on the UMC's Judicial Council, he also served on the board of trustees of the Good Samaritan Foundation (GSF) from July 2000 and chaired the trustees starting in 2003. The UMC and the GSF were engaged in a long and costly lawsuit beginning in May 2000. Two former members of the Judicial Council who worked with Holsinger from 2000-2004, Sally C. Askew, Esq., and Sally B. Geis, Ph.D., stated that Holsinger never mentioned being party to a lawsuit against the UMC, nor did he at any time address possible conflicts of interest involved in being a member of the UMC's "supreme court" while engaged in significant litigation against the UMC.
The litigation involved the sale in 1995 of a 330 bed UMC hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, to a for-profit corporation and the disposition of the $20 million realized from the sale. The hospital's trustees refused to hand over the proceeds to the rightful owners, the Kentucky Annual Conference (KAC) of the UMC. Instead, the self-appointed trustees placed the $20 million into a fund under their sole control in an undisclosed location. Then the trustees proceeded to form six corporate subsidiaries, including one (www.charityball.Inc - a non-functioning URL) that was incorporated in Alaska and Wisconsin (Wisconsin Department of Regulation & Licensing, 2007). Additionally, in direct conflict with the stated values of the UMC the trustees engaged in gambling fund-raising ventures, one of which lost $27,500.
According to court records, the foundation's trustees refused to tell the KAC what happened to the $20 million from the sale of the UMC hospital for nearly five years...
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Bill Berkowitz
August 30, 2007
Often affable and self-effacing, Luntz hopes to transition from GOP political operative to a non-partisan political commentator
Whether he eventually winds up backing a particular candidate or not, when the story of Election 2008 is told, Frank Luntz intends to have his name writ large over that history. These days, Luntz, a corporate and Republican Party political consultant/pollster, is all over the media; he's running focus groups during many of the political debates where he declares winners and losers, he's being quoted in various media outlets about all things political, and he's a regular contributor to the Fox News Channel, where he pontificates at will.
In addition, he has given marketing advice to the BBC, political advice to British politicians, and was hired by Ireland's RTE's "The Week in Politics."
While the televised Luntz often displays a disarming sense of humor, is reasonably affable and self-effacing, he is also self-righteous and an endless supplier of disingenuous blather. Watching him in action is to recognize a master of style over substance; emotion trumps fact.
Luntz earned his stripes by helping set the stage for the Republican Revolution of 1994 by co-authoring Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." Over the past dozen years, he helped keep the national debate over global warming in a holding pattern by counseling GOP candidates "to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." He advised the Bush Administration to use the term "climate change" instead of "global warming," because it was less frightening.
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Bill Berkowitz
August 23, 2007
Freedom's Watch, a new group of former ambassadors and Bush pitchmen are targeting dozens of congressional representatives with $15 million worth of pro-war radio and television advertisements
It's been a long time since the halcyon days of the 1980s when religious and secular right wing organizations would round up the troops, create a letterhead group, drop a boatload of direct mail fundraising letters, and successfully promote the domestic and foreign policy agenda of President Ronald Reagan. Before, and during the early months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, conservatives initiated a similar spate of activities aimed at organizing support for the invasion. Predicting immediate success, these groups not only promulgated their vision of a Middle East dominated by the U.S., they also demonized any and all opponents of the invasion.
Now, with the stench of a lame duck president permeating the White House, Freedom's Watch, a new group of Bush administration former ambassadors and high-powered donors, has launched a multi-million dollar campaign to win back the public's support for the war on Iraq. Is this the 'stay the course' crowd's last stand?
According to its website, Freedom's Watch, a 501 (c) (4) nonprofit corporation, is "dedicated to fighting to protect the ideals and issues that keep America strong and prosperous."
Despite Andrew Card's famous dictum about not introducing a marketing campaign in the dog days of August, Freedom Watch is up against the wall. In a press release issued by the group on August 22, it announced the "launch[ing] a nationwide grassroots campaign aimed at ensuring Congress continues to fully fund the troops with the ultimate goal of victory in the War on Terror." It claimed that it will spend some $15 million on radio and television advertisements from now through mid-September, the time Gen. David Petraeus delivers his progress report on the situation in Iraq.
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