Posted on 06/12/2005 9:45:17 AM PDT by kerryusama04
Love that NRA! This alone is worth $35 per year.
BTTT
Haven't read thru the whole article yet.
I'm annoyed by the " u.s." not being capitalized. What's with that?
Hoodwinked?? (Snicker) Try bought and paid for. Many, on both sides of the aisle are nothing more than small to medium sized one man/woman businesses, dealing in power and influence. This is a serious problem, IMO every bit as problematic as the WOT.
I believe many parts of the constitution do not capitolize it when they talk of the these united states.
It is capitalized in the original but a diferet font. It just did not carry over well.
I believe that's a different usage than the U.S. Congress. The U.S. Congress is a title. "These unites states" is not. I don't think I've ever seen this "u.s. Congress" written this way before.
The worst gov that $$$ can buy.
There's a difference between "these united states", a description of the country, and The United States, the name of the country.
This is from a partial transcript of the tape.
The transcript is from a video of the event obtained by The Post. Treglia is describing Pew's strategy to promote campaign-finance reform from the mid-1990s until the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
Treglia: The strategy was designed not to hide Pew's involvement ... but most of Pew's funding, Pew takes front and center ... you always see sort of Pew's name ... This strategy, I advised Pew that Pew should be in the background. And by law, the grantees always have to disclose. But I always encouraged the grantees never to mention Pew...
I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter. And now that I'm several months away from Pew and we have campaign-finance reform, I can tell this story...
The role of money ... was eroding trust that elections were fair. And so there was this undercurrent of distrust of the electoral process and ultimately of democracy. And so I believed that in order to begin to address that distrust we had to somehow take the unaccountable money out of the system or make it more transparent and more accountable...
So, when I started to survey the landscape, I saw an advocacy community bent on a comprehensive fix: full public financing reform. I knew, having worked on the Hill, and having run several campaigns, Congress wasn't going to vote for a full public-financing bill, and frankly no one in America was going to support a full public-financing bill. It's welfare for politicians.
There were the same old advocacy groups ... who were calling for reform, and they had lost legitimacy inside Washington because they didn't have a constituency that would punish Congress if they didn't vote for reform...
We wanted to expand the voices calling for reform to include the business community, to include minority organizations and to include religious groups, to counter the Christian Coalition. The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington. The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform...
Over seven years, I spent about $30 million of Pew money on this effort. And the money led directly to key elements of the McCain-Feingold legislation: the ban on soft-money, the issue-advocacy provision, the better disclosure and the stand-by-your-ad...
We funded the business community, minority groups, religious groups.
Treglia on the Supreme Court's decision upholding BCRA:
Treglia: If you look at the Supreme Court decision, you will see that almost half of the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding the law are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
A reporter questions Treglia on whether it is hypocritical for campaign-finance proponents to obscure their role in supporting legislation:
Treglia: The reality is we did everything by the letter of the law. All our grantees disclosed that they were Pew grantees. We disclosed on our 990s and on our annual reports that we gave to all these people. We just never released press releases saying that we were funding these grants at the time...
If any reporter wanted to know, they could have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn't...
Did we push the envelope? Yeah. Were we encouraged internally to push the envelope? Yeah ... We stayed within the letter, if not the spirit of the law.
Treglia says more about the Pew campaign-finance reform strategy:
Treglia: Having been on the Hill I knew that ... if Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless. It'd be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain. So, in order, in essence, to convey the impression that this was something coming naturally from outside the Beltway, I felt it was best that Pew stay in the background...
It wasn't stealth ... All you had to do was go to the grantee's Web site, and look at the funders, and you'd see Pew.
An audience member asks Treglia what would have happened had the press caught on to Pew's involvement in lobbying for campaign-finance legislation before the passage of BCRA:
Treglia: We had a scare. As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this, that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress. But you know what the good news is from my perspective? Journalists didn't care. They didn't know what to make of it. They didn't care. They don't know about the sector, so no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up.
I thought the name of the country is "The United States of America".
It should be capitalized in both cases.
I know of a lot more important things than the few you listed, but you comment on what you want to and I will comment on what I want to. Thank God for the freedom of speech we still have left.
Yeah. CFR was the scam of the decade. Unbelievable!!!!! And I will forever blame the MSM most of all. They wanted this baby because they thought it would aid the liberals. This jokers make their living due to the freedoms of the First Amendment. HOW DARE THEY help abridge those freedoms for others.
I find what happened here analagous to a fire chief arriving on the scene of a 5 alarm fire with multiple casualties and stopping to comment to the news reporter on the color of the carpet.
Wayne LaPierre is right. I still have web data from mid-90s going back to very early 90s concerning CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM on hard disks. Names names. Groups, Orgs, Politicians, not just in CA but throughout the US. And, the list Orgs -- continue to come up with lavish funds to fight anything truly constitutional; and support those orgs seeking to undermine the Constitution. Overall, that data has shown up in various articles and reports, since then. And those groups are being exposed for their "links" and how they skirt being "totally honest" with the American Public -- while they claim to be "like" so "totally honest" with the American public.
BUMP
bumping again!!
I'd like to see this get appealed again.
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