Free Republic

There's still good money in this strange creature known as "poverty law," it turns out. The successful fundraising firm, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, sent out a mass email today hailing the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president. Incidentally, according to its most current publicly available tax return (2005), the fabulous wealthy nonprofit took in a staggering $110,924,926 in donations in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004, and reported 2005 year-end assets of $212,958,685 (that's more than the Heritage Foundation has in assets). The SPLC exaggerates the scope of racism in the nation in order to frighten donors into...

Famed civil rights lawyer Morris Dees is increasingly focused now on Latino immigrant worker rights. Dees, best-known for legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations and hate groups, spoke with University of Nebraska-Lincoln law students over noon pizza last week. “Human rights begins close to home,” he reminded them. The issue is “liberty and justice for all,” he told them. Latino workers, as well as other immigrants, come to the United States primarily for jobs, Dees said, sometimes migrating here because failed U.S. policies adversely affected conditions in their own countries. If there was a...

Obsessed with fundraising, the fabulously wealthy Southern Poverty Law Center exaggerates the scope of racism in the United States to frighten donors into opening their wallets. It spends little on actual litigation and uses politically skewed definitions of racism to indoctrinate children while smearing conservatives who question racial preference programs. It has one key message: America is boiling over with hatred and intolerance. Decades after the civil rights movement forever changed America, U.S. race relations are always worse today than in the days of Jim Crow, according to SPLC. “Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant. The dragging death...

You've read about him. You've seen him on TV. A sappy network TV movie about him, starring Corbin Bernsen, is now doing re-run hell on the Lifetime Channel. To believe the conventional wisdom, Morris Dees, Jr. is a brave man who protects Blacks and Jews against White Supremacist Klansmen. That's the PR, anyway. The truth is otherwise. The real Morris Dees, chief of the misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is using our courts to take American land from Americans and give it to illegal aliens. If this is the new civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. must be turning...

Two Illegal Immigrants Win Arizona Ranch in Court Fight ANDREW POLLACK Published: August 19, 2005 DOUGLAS, Ariz., Aug. 18 - Spent shells litter the ground at what is left of the firing range, and camouflage outfits still hang in a storeroom. Just a few months ago, this ranch was known as Camp Thunderbird, the headquarters of a paramilitary group that promised to use force to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking across the border with Mexico. David Bowser for The New York Times The New York Times Now, in a turnabout, the 70-acre property about two miles from the border is...