Libertarian ping.To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here. Liberals? Colluding? I'm shocked, shocked (/end Claude Rains impersonation).
An interesting article.
Another great post Liz. Thanks for all of your work posting/exposing anti-freedom, anti-life criminals.
Thank God it didn't work for John Kerry.
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.
McCain's Reform Institute
Donations above $50,000
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Chartwell Charitable Foundation
CSC Holdings, Inc.
Echosphere
The Educational Foundation of America
Mr. Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. Revocable Trust
McMullen Family Foundation
OSI Constitution & Legal Policy Program
Proteus Fund
Mr. Charles H. Spaulding
Stuart Family Foundation
Tides Foundation
Campaign Finance Reformed worked! We had the most expensive, special-interest driven, negative campaign by far in our history and all it cost us was our First Amendment.
FEC Considers Restricting Online Political Activities ( Web Ads, Bloggers' Endorsements) - by Brian Faler, Washington Post, March 21, 2005 - posted to Free Republic, March 21, 2005, by Former Military Chick:
The agency is weighing whether -- and how -- to impose restrictions on a host of online activities, including campaign advertising and politically oriented blogs...
The FEC, which enforces federal election law, had issued scores of regulations delineating how the campaign finance reform legislation adopted in 2002 ought to be implemented...
[Representative] Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) ..., who sponsored the legislation, complained that many of those rules were too lax, and ... successfully sued to have them rescinded.
The well poisoners. Rotten and mean.
Shame too on Andrew Kohut of Pew and Jim Lehrer of PBS for their lack of disclosure.
The trustfunder left
Michael Barone (archive)
March 21, 2005 | Print | Send
Examining the political map of America, as I am obliged to do as I write the chapters of "The Almanac of American Politics 2006," reveals a previously unidentified segment of the American electorate, one which has been growing for some years now but has reached a critical mass and become a major force in one of our two great political parties: the trustfunder left.
Who are the trustfunders? People with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard. People who can live more or less wherever they want. The "nomadic affluent," as demographic analyst Joel Kotkin calls them.
These people tend to be very liberal politically. Aware that they have done nothing to earn their money, they feel a certain sense of guilt. At the elite private or public high schools they attend, and even more at their colleges and universities, they are propagandized about the evils of capitalism and globalization, and the virtues of environmentalism and pacifism. Patriotism is equated with Hiterlism.
Their loyalties, as Samuel Huntington explains in "Who Are We?," are not national, but transnational -- they are citizens of the world with contempt for those who feel chills up their spines when they hear "The Star Spangled Banner." They are taught to have contempt for the economic contribution they make to their country as investors and to feel guilty if they make no other contribution. Their penance is that they must vote left.
Where can you find trustfunders? Not scattered randomly around the country, but heavily concentrated in certain areas. Places with kicky restaurants, places tolerant of alternative lifestyles, places with lots of art galleries and organic food stores and Starbucks competitors. The heaviest concentration is in the San Francisco Bay area, which, Kotkin says, has the largest percentage of trustfunders of any major metro area in the country.
The Bay area stands out in stark relief on the political map. It voted 70 percent to 29 percent for John Kerry in 2004, up from the 64 percent to 30 percent margin it cast for Al Gore in 2000. Without the Bay area's 1.15 million-vote margin for Kerry, California would have come within 82,000 votes of voting for George W. Bush.
Trustfunders stand out even more vividly when you look at the political map of the Rocky Mountain states. In Idaho and Wyoming, each state's wealthiest county was also the only county to vote for John Kerry: Blaine County, Idaho (Sun Valley), where Kerry stayed at his wife's imported Cotswold farmhouse on his much photographed skiing and snowboarding vacation, and Teton County, Wyo. (Jackson Hole), where Dick Cheney has a house and where Bill Clinton took a pre-election holiday after his pollster Dick Morris reported that a trip to the mountains focus-grouped better than Martha's Vineyard.
Speaking of Martha's Vineyard, it voted 73 percent for Kerry, and nearby Nantucket, where Kerry's wife has another house, voted 63 percent for him -- indeed, Nantucket was one of only three of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties that did not vote for George W. Bush. Massachusetts Catholics gave their fellow Massachusetts Catholic Kerry only 51 percent of their votes, but he won 77 percent in Boston, 85 percent in Cambridge, and 69 percent and 73 percent in trustfunder-heavy Hampshire and Berkshire Counties in the western mountains.
Where Democrats had a good year in 2004 they owed much to trustfunders. In Colorado, they captured a Senate and a House seat and both houses of the legislature. Their political base in that state is increasingly not the oppressed proletariat of Denver, but the trustfunder-heavy counties that contain Aspen (68 percent for Kerry), Telluride (72 percent) and Boulder (66 percent).
You can see the trustfunders' imprint as well in New York. In 56 of the state's 62 counties, the Republican popular vote margin increased or the Democratic margin fell between 2000 and 2004. Five of the six counties that moved away from George W. Bush are trustfunder havens: New York (Manhattan), Ulster (Woodstock), Columbia (trendy Hudson River country), Otsego (Cooperstown) and Tompkins (Cornell University).
The political map shows the trustfunders' impact. So, I suspect, would an analysis of the sources of the vast amounts of money that flowed in through the Internet first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry and to outfits like moveon.org.
The good news for Democrats is that they have found a new source of votes and money. The bad news is that an important part of their core constituency has the characteristic that the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin ascribed to the press, "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."
CNBC is playing the same tricks on the public with bogus polls of personal Social Security accounts. Most polls, if they closely reinforce the liberal agenda, cannot be trusted.
SCOTUS grotesquely failed basic principles of democracy and freedom with its recent decision upholding McCain-Feingold CFR).
More Pewtrid Polls, Sunday, March 20, 2005
By The Associated Press
Recent public opinion on Iraq suggests two basic findings: A majority of people are generally unhappy with President Bush's handling of Iraq and they are resigned to the importance of seeing the commitment through.
Some other results from recent polls on Iraq:
_Six in 10 think the president does not have a clear plan for bringing the Iraq situation to a successful conclusion.
_Two-thirds say the level of casualties in Iraq has been unacceptable, when comparing the goals of the war to the costs.
_A solid majority, about 55 percent, have said for months that U.S. troops must stay until the situation is stable.
_People are closely divided on whether the war was a mistake, according to several polls.
_A majority of people think Iraq aided al-Qaida before the war and had weapons of mass destruction — two opinions that have been widely debated.
_People are closely divided on whether the war in Iraq helped or hurt in the war on terrorism.
These findings come from polls by ABC-The Washington Post, The Associated Press-Ipsos, CNN-USA Today-Gallup and the Pew Research Center. The polls of about 1,000 adults each were taken in late February or early March and each has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Fascinating. Thanks.
Pew must not be allowed to remain a tax exempt organization.
self-ping
Libertarian ping.To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here.