Posted on 03/05/2004 7:59:59 PM PST by TexasRainmaker
September 11 families say Bush campaign treading on the dead....
so reads the headline. It makes one think that Bush has enraged every member of every family who lost someone on September 11. It gives the idea that Bush has crossed the line and disrespected the victims of our nation's tragedy....
....then you read "the rest of the story".
The article has quotes from some women like Rita Lasar, who lost her brother. Rita says, "Ground Zero is a sacred site ... find some other way to run a campaign without stepping on the bodies of our dead." In passing it mentions that Rita is a steering committee member of the group, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
Then another article quotes Colleen Kelly as saying, "It's absolutely inappropriate ... There are certain memories and certain images that I consider sacred." Colleen Kelly leads the group, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
Now just reading these articles leaves the average person with the feeling that these women would have no political agenda, they're simply mourning victims of a national tragedy who are voicing their heartfelt, personal feelings in reaction to a few ads supporting President Bush in the Presidential campaign. But let's take a closer look....
Peaceful Tomorrows Organized primarily by families of victims, Peaceful Tomorrows seeks to open up a public dialogue about appropriate alternative responses to the September 11 tragedies. Efforts will be made to raise awareness of the complex issues involved in responding to terrorism and influence the US policy towards more effective, democratically-based responses to terrorism in both domestic and foreign policy.
That is the description of the group as presented on a list of projects sponsored by the Tides Center of Pennsylvannia. http://www.tidescenter.org/project_detail.cfm?id=60053.0
But who is the Tides Center? Known as the Tides Center for Pennsylvania, formerly the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, it is none other than a creation of the Tides Foundation and Center, headquartered in San Francisco, and two Pennsylvania-based foundations -- the Vira Heinz Endowment and the Howard Heinz Endowment-- chaired by Teresa Heinz Kerry, heir to the Heinz food company fortune and wife of Democrat presidential contender Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
That's right.... these poor outraged victims are simply pawns in the political workings of the Democrat Party.
Tides works like this: When a high-profile donor wants to give money to a group with an extreme agenda but doesn't want its fingerprints on the donation, it simply gives the money to The Tides Foundation in the form of a "donor- advised donation." Tides then passes that money on to the desired recipient, masking the real source of the cash. As anti-war activist Drummond Pike (who set up the Tides Foundation in 1976 for the express purpose of keeping donors' identities unknown) told the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a publication for the nonprofit world, "Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with."
And, the amount of "hidden money" handled by the Tides Foundation is considerable. Since its founding, the relatively little-known foundation has made over $300 million in grants. In 2002 it amassed assets of $139 million and had an income of $59.3 million. Between 1995 and 2001, $4.3 million of that money came from the Howard Heinz Endowment. In 2002, it and the Vira Heinz Endowment blessed The Tides Center, a San Francisco spin-off of the Tides Foundation, with another $190,000 while the two endowments gave $1.6 million to the new Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania.
If all this movement of money between the Tides Foundation, Tides Center, two Heinz Endowments and Pittsburgh's new Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania has you shaking your head, let's talk about your money. You, the taxpayer.
Nearly $8 million in taxpayer money flowed into the Tides Center in the form of federal grants made by eight different agencies between 1997 and 2001. They include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy. Does this mean your tax dollars also are going to fund the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, a creation of the Howard Heinz Endowment, which in 2001 was worth a breathtaking $788.6 million in 2001? With the Tides Center for a partner, we will likely never know.
What we do know is that, with Tides as a partner, the Heinz Endowments now keep interesting company.
The Tides Center also manages the Youth Gender Project whose goal is to "empower and support transgender, gender-variant, intersexed and gender-questioning youth and young adults." I freely admit, not all of these terms are in my spell-checker.
Grant recipients also include the Iraq Peace Fund that has so far granted $489,000 to 27 groups to promote anti-war marches and their coverage by the news media, as well as the mission of one of those groups, MoveOn.org, whose purpose is to defeat George W. Bush.
While groups such as these and dozens of others organized and/or financed by the Tides Foundation and Center are relatively recent in their origin and transient in their nature, many are more established and pervasive in their influence.
The Ruckus Society, which received over $200,000 in Tides money between 1999 and 2002, was begun in 1995 to train activists in violent protest against biotechnology, globalization and the World Bank. It incited property destruction in the Seattle riots of 1999 and Washington, D.C., the following year. However, Ruckus director John Sellers didn't see the wanton destruction of property as being violent at all. He told Mother Jones magazine, " I make a distinction between violence and destruction of property. Violence to me is against living things. But inanimate objects? I think you can be destructive, you can use vandalism strategically. It may be violence under the law but I just don't think it's violence."
The Natural Resources Defense Council, another Tides project, destroyed many apple farmers in Washington state with its phony Alar pesticide scare. It "leaked" a false report that Alar, used by the state's apple growers there, caused cancer, particularly in children. Even movie stars signed onto the hoax, testifying before Congress about Alar's dangers. Sales of apples plummeted before the hoax could be debunked.
Finally, the American Medical Association concluded, "The Alar scare of three years ago shows what can happen when science is taken out of context or the risks of a product are blown out of proportion." Unfortunately, that conclusion came too late to save the livelihoods of many growers.
Unfortunately, too, it came too late to prevent NRDC from cashing in to the tune of $700,000 from a book on the bogus scare.
But that seems to be what Tides and its dozens of its related organizations are about: money, a flagrant disregard for the truth, and even disdain for the law.
So, in the end, we don't really have heartfelt outrage by a few victims' family members, we have a concerted, coordinated political campaign, cloaked in a shroud of mourning, waging war against George W. Bush in his bid for reelection. I think we all should be completely outraged as the Democrat's use of this tactic as one of the lowest, most vile examples of disgraceful political gamesmanship in modern history.
Now all the pieces are coming together. You see, as these "outraged" family members were touring the airwaves, there was a peculiar familiary to their comments. Despite being on numerous different media outlets in different cities at different time, most of them repeated the same four or fives lines - VERBATIM. The Democrat talking points certainly found their way to the fax machines last night, didn't they?
Additionally, in Bal Harbour, Fla., the International Association of Fire Fighters Union, which endorsed Kerry early in the presidential race, approved a resolution asking the Bush campaign to pull the ads and urging him to apologize to the families. The union formally endorsed John Kerry in the Fall of 2002. Many rank and file firefighters, when asked, said they did not share their union leader's sentiments. It's a shame Katie Couric failed to ask for their opinions on national television.
Isn't it telling the tactics the Democrats have to use to challenge Bush? Doesn't it say much about their message, their party and their candidate? They can't deliver an honest statement or valid solution to the American public. They are wrapped in their little world millions of miles out of touch with the average, mainstream American that they must stoop to illegal, unethical and immoral actions to get a point across.
But you see, not all victims' relatives were angered by the television campaign. "It speaks to the truth of the times," said Jennie Farrell, who lost her brother in the attacks. "September 11 was something beyond the realm of imagination, and George Bush . . . led us through one of the darkest moments in history."
"These images honor those whose lives were lost," said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles, was the pilot of the plane that hijackers crashed into the Pentagon.
So here we have it. Some victims' families have come out to say the message Bush is advancing honors their fallen relatives. Reactions that are truly from the heart. And then you have the Left, positioning union bosses to claim outrage in the name of their disagreeing union members, and using questionable activist organizations, hidden behind layers of endowments and charities to exploit victims' families for the sake of gaining political power for their candidate.
It is truly sickening what they've come to and it makes me wonder what we're in for over the next eight months. God help this nation.
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