Posted on 03/21/2005 3:18:25 AM PST by MisterRepublican
If a political gaffe consists of inadvertently revealing the truth, then Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, has just ripped the curtain off of the "good government" groups that foisted the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill on the country in 2002. The bill's restrictions on political speech have the potential for great mischief; just last month a member of the Federal Election Commission warned they could limit the activities of bloggers and other Internet commentators.
What Mr. Treglia revealed in a talk last year at the University of Southern California is that far from representing the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, the campaign finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by liberal foundations like Pew. In a tape obtained by the New York Post, Mr. Treglia tells his USC audience they are going to hear a story he can reveal only now that campaign finance reform has become law. "The target audience for all this [foundation] activity was 535 people in [Congress]," Mr. Treglia says in his talk. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere [Congress] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."
The truth was far different. Mr. Treglia admits that campaign-finance supporters had to try to hoodwink Congress because "they had lost legitimacy inside Washington because they didn't have a constituency that would punish Congress if they didn't vote for reform."
So instead, according to Mr. Treglia, liberal reform groups created a Potemkin movement.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
I'm sure I don't have to point out that this is what you get when you have justices ruling based on "current trends" rather than the Constituion.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Which is what all the brouhaha about the President's judicial appointments is all about.
Won't happen unless there are torches and pitchforks outside Congress. The law benefits incumbents, and, if we don't watch, will be used as a way to kill the 1st Amendment.
Ultimately and unfortunately, Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill; and that is where the buck stops.
There another issue here: is it in the best interests of the country to allow tax-advantaged foundations to have eternal life?
This is the effect of the present law, which requires foundations, in order to maintain their status, to give away 5 percent of their assets every year.
This is all well and good, except for the last several decades, foundations have been making a return of over 7% in their investments. In other words, if they were funded sufficiently at the beginning, a funding that was probably a tax deduction for the founder, their assets will not be consumed, but instead will grow.
The simple answer to this is for Congress to raise this minimum annual payout to at least 8%.
History shows as these foundations become more detached from the real world, they appoint more and more lefties to their boards and this perpetuates the leftist grant funding engines these foundations operate.
I suggested this to my Congresscritter in person, and strangely it fell on deaf ears. I can only imagine how the very charitable Pew Trust would suddenly turn visciously un-charitable for anyone so foolish to propose this.
There another issue here: is it in the best interests of the country to allow tax-advantaged foundations to have eternal life?
This is the effect of the present law, which requires foundations, in order to maintain their status, to give away 5 percent of their assets every year.
This is all well and good, except for the last several decades, foundations have been making a return of over 7% in their investments. In other words, if they were funded sufficiently at the beginning, a funding that was probably a tax deduction for the founder, their assets will not be consumed, but instead will grow.
The simple answer to this is for Congress to raise this minimum annual payout to at least 8%.
History shows as these foundations become more detached from the real world, they appoint more and more lefties to their boards and this perpetuates the leftist grant funding engines these foundations operate.
I suggested this to my Congresscritter in person, and strangely it fell on deaf ears. I can only imagine how the very charitable Pew Trust would suddenly turn visciously un-charitable for anyone so foolish to propose this.
Ping!
In Mr. Teglia's defense, how was he supposed to know that there was someone who was not a radical leftist in the audience? He was, after all, on a college campus. He thought he was addressing a 'friendly' crowd, and leftist evil means always justify their evil ends.
What the People's representatives can do, the Peoples representatives can UNDO.
Hmmmmmm.... rescind McCain-Feingold?
McCain Feingold will remain on the books. As much as the radical leftists wanted it for their nefarious purposes, the congresscritters wanted it for their own. It is the incumbency protection act, and for that reason it will survive.
I think we shall have to settle for any public mention of 'Pew Charitable Trust' as 'Pew, the organization that faked research to compromise our free speech rights'
Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee
By Ryan Sager Published 03/11/2005
In September of 2000, less than two years before the passage of McCain-Feingold, the liberal magazine The American Prospect put out a special issue devoted to campaign-finance reform. It was called, "Checkbook Democracy." And it was bought and paid for with a $132,000 check from the liberal Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has spent millions of dollars promoting laws to restrict political speech -- a fact the magazine never disclosed to its readers.
Welcome behind the curtains of the campaign-finance reform movement, where ideologues plot to restrict the speech of their fellow citizens while reserving a special free-speech zone for themselves.
Sounds paranoid? A little over the top?
Consider a report just out from the folks over at Political Money Line, "Campaign Finance Reform Lobby: 1994 to 2004." Ignored by the media to date, it details how the supposedly grass-roots campaign-finance reform movement has been funded over the last decade to the tune of $140 million. Of that $140 million, the vast majority ($123 million) came not from retirees scraping together their last nickels for the cause of democracy, nor from schoolchildren collecting deposits on cans plucked from dilapidated playgrounds.
No, the money came from just eight ultra-liberal foundations (including the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute), the same folks who fund: the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Naderite Public Citizen Foundation and the Feminist Majority Foundation.
That's quite a lot of money sloshing around a movement dedicated to "getting the money out of politics." Of course, the only place these people really want to keep the money out of is their conservative opponents' campaign war chests and the war chests of the independent groups that support them. To the reformers, reform is not an end, it is a means to their pre-existing liberal goals.
As Congress takes up legislation to close the 527 "loophole" that allowed so much pesky speech into the 2004 campaign, and as the FEC is forced by court order to look at ways to cleanse the Internet of insufficiently regulated political speech, it's worth understanding just how the campaign-finance reform lobby operates.
First, let's return to that bought-and-paid-for issue of the Prospect. On Wednesday, the magazine's founder and co-editor, Robert Kuttner, explained that this was one of its first ever "foundation-sponsored" special issues. Since then, he said, the magazine has been careful to disclose any financial contributions to coverage of specific topics right up front. "You probably found the one," he said.
Fair enough. But it's not really the magazine's actions here that should draw the public's attention. It is the campaign of media manipulation that has been quietly undertaken by the reform lobby.
Payments to the media found by Political Money Line include: the $132,000 to the Prospect, $69,000 to Public Radio International, $935,000 to the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation and more than $1.2 million to National Public Radio for items such as, in the words of the official disclosure statements, "news coverage of financial influence in political decision making."
No wonder McCain-Feingold contained a "media exemption." The media -- on top of having their voices amplified when private citizens, labor unions and corporations are barred from speaking -- are relatively easy to write some checks to. (Millions of bloggers, on the other hand, might be a little harder to corral -- hence the calls for a crackdown.)
But it's not just direct payments to the media that are the problem. It's the climate of sanctimony that the McCainiacs have created. All of the major reform groups -- Common Cause, the Alliance for Better Campaigns, the Campaign Finance Institute, the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Responsive Politics, Democracy 21 and the William J. Brennan Jr. Center for Justice -- are funded by the same eight liberal foundations, and have received millions upon millions of dollars each.
Yet, by maintaining the fiction of independence from one and other, they appear to much of the press to be a pack of scrappy underdogs sinking their teeth into the ankles of the big-money men.
Well, it's a sham. It's a charade. It's a lie. They are the big-money men. And, with the release of the Political Money Line report, it's time the media started treating them as such. The billionaires and liberal foundations constantly calling for more restrictions on the freedom of ordinary Americans to assemble and speak are not a movement -- they are a lobby.
And the first lobbyist who should be called out is none other than the Reformer-in-Chief, Sen. John McCain. The senator has been caught with his pants down this week, accepting what are essentially campaign contributions to a phony think tank called the Reform Institute.
The Institute, according to its Web site, is technically a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization, "representing a thoughtful, moderate voice for reform in the campaign finance and election administration debates."
In reality, however, the organization might better be dubbed McCain 2008 headquarters. The head of the Institute's advisory committee is none other than McCain, and his name appears in every other press release. What's more, the manager of McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, Rick Davis, is president of the institute and draws a $110,000 a year "consulting fee" -- at least until the official campaign gets underway.
Major donors who wish to flatter the senator's vanity and give a boost to his presidential ambitions can write checks to the Institute in amounts that would be illegal many times over (under McCain-Feingold) if the checks went to the actual McCain campaign.
One such donor is Cablevision, which gave the Institute $100,000 right after its CEO, Charles Dolan, testified before McCain's Senate Commerce Committee in 2003. Another $100,000 check from Cablevision came into the Institute in August of 2004, 12 days before McCain wrote to Dolan about a pending pricing issue, urging him to "feel free to contact me and discuss these issues further."
McCain, of course -- ever the scrappy underdog fighting for the little guy against the moneyed interests -- argues that the donations and the political help to Cablevision have nothing to do with one and other. In fact, he argues, no donation to the Reform Institute could possibly curry favor with him. (Cablevision must really just love clean government!) "There's not a conflict of interest when you're involved in an organization that is non-partisan, nonprofit, nonpolitical," he said.
Well, McCain can tell that to the NRA, the ACLU, the AFL-CIO and the rest of the non-partisan groups that sued to overturn his law.
In the meantime, he should be convicted in the court of public opinion based solely on the "appearance of corruption" -- after all, that's the standard by which he judges the public's right to speak.
Given these shenanigans, will Congress really listen now that he's calling again for further restrictions? Well, he certainly knows where they live: "Some billionaire decides he or she doesn't like you in office, and they decide to form a 527 and contribute $10 million or $20 million and dive-bomb into your state or district," McCain said last month. "That should alarm every federally elected member of Congress."
Elected officials deciding who can and cannot criticize them -- that should alarm every citizen of the United States. Now, if only someone would pay The American Prospect to spread the word.
Ryan Sager is a member of the editorial board of The New York Post. He also edits the blog Miscellaneous Objections and can be reached at editor@rhsager.com.
BTTT
Free Speech Needs Jerry Maguire
Tech Central Station ^ | 3/18/05 | Ryan Sager
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1367101/posts
Remember Jerry Maguire? Since it's never too early for some mid-'90s nostalgia, I'll remind you of four little words: SHOW ME THE MONEY! Keep those four words on the tips of your tongues, because they may just save blogs from Sens. John McCain and Russ Feingold.
Here's how.
Everyone knows by now that the campaign-finance lobby has got online political speech in its crosshairs. Commissioner Brad Smith of the Federal Election Commission performed the public service of alerting the public to that fact earlier this month -- specifically, he alerted us to the fact that the FEC has been forced by a court decision to write rules for what online speech does and does not fall under the restrictions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
Since Smith made his comments, the "cleanies" have issued backtrack after backtrack and denial after denial, all of which, in the end, have boiled down to this: "Well, yes, but don't worry…You can trust us."
Well, no, we can't.
So here's how concerned citizens should respond: Show us the money!
The cleanies want to crack down on 527s? Show us the money! They want to replace the FEC with a new regulatory body wielding even greater power? Show us the money! They want to start down a slippery slope that will end with links to campaign Web sites counting as donations to campaigns? Show…us…the…money.
As I've shown in two recent columns -- one on TCS and the other in The New York Post -- the last thing on earth the cleanies want to do is show us the money: where it comes from, how much of it comes and the motives behind it coming.
That's because campaign-finance reform is not a "movement" as its proponents have claimed, it is a lobby -- funded and orchestrated by eight very liberal foundations which fooled Congress and the American people into believing that the front groups they set up were grassroots organizations.
But I've only told half of the story. In fact, I am only able to tell half of the story, because the other half will require the collective intelligence of the blogosphere.
And that's where "Show Us the Money" comes in.
A huge chunk of money ($123 million) that finances the campaign-finance-reform lobby comes from left-wing foundations -- I've shown that in my articles, relying largely on an informative report put out recently by Political Money Line. But a bunch more money comes from corporations and wealthy individuals, and that money wasn't captured in the Political Money Line report -- because the groups that lobby for campaign-finance reform by and large don't disclose where they get their money.
You read that right: The disclosure crowd is made up of hypocrites who won't disclose where their own money comes from.
Now, as non-profits, they're not required to do this. But if they're going to work to repeal the First Amendment on the premise that money dictates motives, well, they better show us theirs.
For example, who are the donors to the Reform Institute, and what did they want (and/or get) for their money? The Reform Institute, you might remember, is the bogus think tank that serves as a shadow McCain 2008 office. It's supposedly a not-for-profit "education organization," but mostly it just educates the public about how totally awesome John McCain is. What's more, at least three high-ranking McCain 2000 staffers are cooling their heels there until McCain 2008.
Richard Davis, the McCain 2000 campaign manager, takes home a $110,000 a year "consulting fee" as the fake-tank's president. Trevor Potter, general counsel to McCain 2000, is -- fittingly enough -- general counsel to the Reform Institute. And Carla Eudy, national finance director of McCain 2000, is -- you may have guessed it -- the Institute's director of finance.
An Associated Press investigation earlier this month already found that Cablevision gave the Institute $100,000 right after its CEO, Charles Dolan, testified before McCain's Commerce Committee in 2003. Another $100,000 check from Cablevision came into the Institute in August of 2004, 12 days before McCain wrote to Dolan about a pending pricing issue, urging him to "feel free to contact me and discuss these issues further."
What other companies made donations to his think tank -- donations, by the way, that would be illegal many times over under McCain-Feingold because of their size if made to a political party or campaign?
Most importantly, when will the cleanies come clean? Show us the money!
This week, I tried to get three major campaign-finance groups to release lists of their donors.
Democracy 21 told me: "Democracy 21 complies with the rules that apply to all nonprofit groups. In addition, although not required by law and not done by most nonprofit groups, we have disclosed the foundation grants we have received." In other words, they're not going to release the names of the companies and individuals who have donated.
Common Cause released a list of donors over $25,000 -- though only for the last four years. They refused to release the names of donors below that threshold.
The Brennan Center for Justice didn't get back to me after repeated phone calls.
That leaves: the Alliance for Better Campaigns, the Campaign Finance Institute, the Campaign for America, the Campaign Legal Center, the Campaign Reform Project, the Center for Governmental Studies, the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Responsive Politics, the Committee for Economic Development, the National Voting Rights Institute and Public Campaign.
Not one of these groups discloses all of its donors over $200 -- as is required by law for pretty much any other political contribution.
Again, they don't have to. These groups are supposedly non-partisan, and they supposedly don't lobby for or against specific legislation. But recent revelations have made it clear that the more we know about the money, the more we'll know about the motives. And the more we know about the motives, the more that can be done to fight further restrictions on political speech.
So, remember, when you hear about any new proposed restriction on political speech: Show us the money!
Ryan Sager is a member of the editorial board of The New York Post. He also edits the blog Miscellaneous Objections and can be reached at editor@rhsager.com.
Hmmmmmm.... rescind McCain-Feingold?
Works for me.
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