Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote announced that her anti-voter fraud group True the Vote is suing the Internal Revenue Service.

Here’s the group’s press release:

True the Vote (TTV), the nation’s leading voters’ rights organization, filed suit in federal court in Washington today against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), asking the Court to grant its long-awaited tax exempt status and seeking damages for the unlawful actions by the IRS in the processing of its application for exempt status. ActRight Legal Foundation, a 501(c)3 fundamental rights and public interest law firm represents True the Vote in the lawsuit.

“We’ve been waiting for three years to receive a decision from the IRS about our tax exempt status,” True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht said. “After answering hundreds of questions and producing thousands of documents, we’re done waiting. The IRS does not have the power to pocket veto our application. Federal law empowers groups like True the Vote to force a decision in court – which is precisely what we aim to do.”

“True the Vote is dedicated solely to promoting election integrity in our Republic,” Engelbrecht said. “Our mission is to educate Americans on all of the rights they enjoy as voters. We do not pick winners and losers, but instead fortify the voting process so that it is fair and free. If this goal is deserving of such scrutiny, then we have serious questions that we, as a nation, must face,” she added.

Cleta Mitchell, counsel to True the Vote and of counsel to ActRight Legal Foundation, stated, “We are not going to allow the IRS to claim, as it has been doing in the past week, that the targeting of conservative groups is over and ‘everything has been fixed.’ It is not yet fixed and this litigation is a vital step both to resolve True the Vote’s status and to learn exactly what happened inside the IRS.”

Read all »

Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.

Anti-deception and collective intelligence: How the Internet makes deception more difficult (part 2)

By Dr. Steven J. Allen (JD, PhD)

In last week’s installment, we looked at the effort to use “crowdsourcing” to catch the Boston Marathon bombers, at the system called “reCAPTCHA” that uses the work of millions of people to decipher words from old books and newspapers, and at the collective effort that caught CBS anchor Dan Rather when he tried to use fake National Guard documents to defect President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. We cited the Rather case as an example of using the Internet to expose deception.

This week, let’s look at the origins of the Internet and how it relates to the concept of collective intelligence—what columnist and author James Surowiecki calls “the wisdom of crowds.”

The origin of the Internet and the blogosphere

Some historians trace the theoretical origin of the Internet to a July 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush, a science advisor to FDR, in which Bush proposed Read all »

From the May 2013 issue of the Capital Research Center publication Labor Watch:

President Obama nominated Thomas Perez, head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department, to be Secretary of Labor. As we go to press, Perez’s nomination faces hurdles. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has put a “hold” on the nomination and demanded that Perez answer questions about his failure to enforce requirements in the 1993 “Motor Voter” law that keep dead persons and other ineligible people off states’ voter rolls.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans have charged that Perez cut a “secret deal behind closed doors” with officials of St. Paul, Minnesota. Allegedly, Perez dropped cases involving bad paperwork on “stimulus” projects—cases that might have returned $200 million to the federal government—in return for the city’s dropping its appeal of a housing case.

Why was the housing case important? Because it could have given the Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn the doctrine of “disparate impact,” which allows the government to make false charges of racial discrimination based on racial bean-counting. (Among other things, Perez has used “disparate impact” to sue banks and force them to make loans to people who aren’t credit-worthy.) Leftists like Perez don’t want the Supreme Court to hear such a case—at least, not until President Obama gets a majority on the Court.

On March 28, Michigan officially became a right-to-work state, although it will take a while for everyone to benefit from the new law as union contracts expire and are re-negotiated. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy spearheaded the research that showed the advantages of right-to-work. Now the Center has created a new website on the issue: MIWorkerFreedom.org, which includes a feature that lets workers generate a letter invoking their right to stop paying union dues.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker and supporters of state-level union reforms chalked up another victory. Previously, unions targeted Walker, his lieutenant governor, pro-reform state legislators, and even state Supreme Court justices who voted not to strike down the reforms. But the reformers have won almost every contest, and the issue appears to have been settled for the near-future by the victory—with 57% of the vote—of Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack. That means the state’s highest court has a 4-3 majority in favor of respecting the reforms, a majority that’s likely to continue for some time.

Pro-reform forces also defeated unions in two local elections, including one in the union stronghold of Milwaukee County, where membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees fell from about 9,000 in 2011 to roughly 3,500 now. Statewide, public-sector union membership fell from 50% to 37% in just one year, 2011 to 2012. Nothing reveals more clearly how trapped workers have been by union bosses.

In Indiana, the state’s Supreme Court threw out by 5-0 a teachers’ union challenge to the state’s voucher program. In Colorado, the state Court of Appeals upheld that state’s only private school choice program, in Douglas County.

Many voucher programs across the country target students who attend failing schools, as determined by drop-out rates, test scores, etc. Meanwhile, in some jurisdictions, test scores now help determine teachers’ and administrators’ salaries. The result? In many places, manipulation of data or outright cheating.  As the Wall Street Journal noted, “When Florida passed voucher legislation in 1999, 78 schools received failing grades. The next year, miraculously, there were none and thus no one qualified for a voucher.” In Atlanta, an investigation caught teachers using X-Acto knives and lighters to open and reseal test booklets, or holding parties where students’ answers were corrected. Some 180 teachers and administrators are believed to have participated; 34 have been indicted. Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers blamed the tests, saying the Atlanta case “crystallizes the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies.”

From the May 2013 issue of the Capital Research Center publication Green Watch:

The nominations of Gina McCarthy to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Ernest Moniz to run the Energy Department have brought cheer to “crony capitalists” hoping to make big bucks from “green energy” scams. As Tim Carney of The Examiner observes, the nominees would “increase government’s role in the energy sector with the cooperation of business.” Moniz is head of MIT’s Energy initiative, which has received funding from corporations seeking to make money off their ties to the Left, including BP, Chevron, Siemens, Duke Energy, and EDF. In the “partnerships” between such businesses and the government—including ethanol, solar, and wind projects, not to mention the “stimulus,” bailouts of too-big-to-fail corporations, and Obamacare—“government steers the ship, while business rows,” Carney complains. “Politicians and bureaucrats tell business what to do, and [some] business gets to make a profit doing it.”

Meanwhile, Chevron, EDF, Shell, CONSOL Energy, and other corporations have teamed with environmentalists at the Center for Sustainable Shale Development, an “independent organization” that will set performance standards and create a certification process for fracking in shale reserves in the Northeast. Among the participating organizations: the Environmental Defense Fund, the Clean Air Task Force, the Group against Smog and Pollution, the William Penn Foundation, and the Heinz Endowments (which have significantly funded fracking critics).

Dow Chemical, Nucor (the country’s largest steel producer), and the aluminum giant Alcoa have teamed in a group called America’s Energy Advantage, which hopes to block exports of liquefied natural gas. The companies want government to keep natural gas artificially cheap so they can benefit financially, but as the Wall Street Journal noted, they are playing into the hands of “the likes of the Sierra Club, whose real goal is to shut down all fracking in a way that would force Dow, Nucor, and Alcoa entirely overseas. Remember what Lenin said about businessmen [selling] the rope to hang themselves?”

In 2008, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute attended a “green investments” conference where (in Ebell’s words) “leading crony capitalists” from such companies as General Electric, Duke Energy, Dow, and Kleiner Perkins (Al Gore’s firm) “smugly explain[ed] how they were going to strike it rich off the backs of consumers and taxpayers with green energy subsidies and mandates, federal loan guarantees, and the higher energy prices that would make renewable energy competitive with coal, oil, and natural gas once cap-and-trade was enacted.”

Now, however, “green energy” is losing money even with all the subsidies and mandates. For example, the chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers) noted recently that the organization’s fund for “clean energy and technology” has an annual rate of return of minus 9.7 percent since 2007.

The solar panel maker Suntech—a Chinese company heavily subsidized by its government—closed its U.S. plant, despite receiving $4.1 million from the U.S. government, the Arizona government, and the city of Goodyear, Arizona.

Fisker Automotive, which taxpayers lent $180 million to build electric cars for rich people, recently dismissed 150 of its remaining 200 employees. It hasn’t built a car since July of last year, when its battery maker, A123 Systems (itself a recipient of $249 million in tax dollars), filed for bankruptcy.

The April 3 “Today” show discussed a poll on “20 widespread conspiracy theories.” “Global warming is a hoax, 37% believe that,” said fill-in host Willie Geist. “Wow!” said weatherman Al Roker. After “Today” laughed at people’s belief in Bigfoot, the faking of the moon landing, and the conspiracy to kill JFK, Roker reiterated, “37% said, 37% of these people don’t believe in global warming! They think it’s a hoax!” Newsreader Natalie Morales: “All these weather events!” Roker: “Okay, two words: Superstorm Sandy!” Morales: “Sandy? Right. There you go.”

Warmist beliefs have spread even among military leaders. The Boston Globe reported that Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, listed “climate change” as the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region. He said “people are surprised sometimes” to hear him make that assessment and that, in order to deal with the problem, “the imperative” is to prepare for the effects of climate change on the “massive populations” of India and China. “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.”

Meanwhile, in the world of science, global warmers are frantic to keep gloom alive. Reuters reported on April 16 that “Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions. Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.”

Today’s Washington Times carries an op-ed by Capital Research Center president Terrence Scanlon:

SCANLON: Bubbles out of the bottle
The nannies aim the hopeless soda-pop war at food stamps

By Terrence Scanlon

The history of welfare programs in the United States is chock full of restrictions on how recipients go about their daily lives. Some are reasonable and in the public interest, but others are heavy-handed and unduly intrusive.

For example, the recent push to block food-stamp recipients from using their benefits to purchase carbonated soft drinks reeks of overreach.

Hopping on New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s anti-obesity bandwagon, South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley has gone too far, proposing to curtail what food-stamp recipients may purchase in her state.

“You are looking at $1 billion that will no longer be put toward candy and chocolate and sodas and chips, but may be put into apples and oranges and things that are healthy.”

It is wishful thinking to expect that forbidding food-stamp users to buy soft drinks with their benefits will stop them from buying soft drinks altogether.

Food-stamp benefits may currently be used to buy “any prepackaged edible foods, regardless of nutritional value (e.g. soft drinks and confections),” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), the formal name of the food-stamp program, whose benefits are distributed by individual U.S. states. Items available in “fast-food restaurants and similar retail settings” cannot be purchased with food stamps.

A 2007 USDA report concluded that prohibiting the use of food stamps to purchase specific items would probably be pointless.

Read all »

Unfriendly Persuasion

Will the Labor Department disarm employers in their struggle with the unions? (Labor Watch, May 2013 – PDF here )

By Diana Furtchgott-Roth

Summary: At the behest of unions desperate for new members, the U.S. Labor Department plans to make a major regulatory shift. The change has no basis in existing law or precedent, and it will harm labor-management relations while costing billions of dollars. 

A shocking change in American labor relations is brewing at the U.S. Department of Labor, which is expected sometime soon to alter a major regulation. The change involves a new interpretation of the “advice exemption” of the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. Specifically, businesses would have to disclose the names of, and fees paid to, attorneys and consultants who advise them on union-organizing activities. In turn, attorneys and consultants providing such advice would be required to disclose their client lists and the fees they receive.

In making this change, the administration would sweep away over a half-century of precedent and contravene both the clear intent of Congress and the law’s express language. This new regulation would violate Read all »

Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.

Anti-deception and collective intelligence: Dan Rather, George W. Bush, and how the Internet makes deception more difficult (part 1)

By Dr. Steven J. Allen (JD, PhD)

Normally, in this series, we look at how deception is used by politicians, bureaucrats, academics, the media, and the allies in order to advance their agendas. This time, though, let’s take a look at how the Internet and related IT (Information Technology) can be used to expose deception.

Also, let’s consider how America’s intelligence agencies process information, and how they might do so more effectively.

The Marathon bombers, JFK, and Turing

The hunt for the Boston Marathon terrorists marked the beginning of a new age in the use of Information Technology.

First, law enforcement officials asked people to provide them with copies of videos and still photographs taken at or near the scene of the bombings. The pictures were used to create a four-dimensional virtual image Read all »

Richard Windsor, aka Lisa Jackson

What’s in the secret e-mails of the head of the EPA? (Green Watch, May 2013 – PDF here)

By Christopher C. Horner

Summary: Transparency used to be a treasured goal of the Left. But the current administration, especially where environmental issues are concerned, has worked hard to prevent sunlight from disinfecting its machinations. Recently, the discovery of secret e-mails may have prompted the resignation of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

People on the Left say they love transparency—which they do, except when it inconveniences them, as it does increasingly today.

For a long time, the Left trumpeted transparency as a core value of liberalism. By the early years of the twentieth century, “open government” was a policy demanded by those who called themselves Progressives. Before Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis coined a famous metaphor for transparency: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Similarly, Justice William O. Douglas once quoted from a New York Review of Books article by historian Henry Steele Commager: “The generation that made the nation thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of Old World tyranny, and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless the people are permitted to know what their government is up to.” That quotation has a near-perfect liberal pedigree: an iconic liberal jurist quoting an iconic liberal historian writing in an iconic liberal publication. Yet as with so many progressive agenda items, “transparency” proved to be about other people. Read all »

Contrary to the mainstream media’s reporting, Progress Kentucky, the left-wing super PAC that allegedly taped Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), has close ties to the Democratic Party. Although party officials have tried to distance themselves from the taping, which may have been illegal, the executive director of Progress Kentucky, Shawn Reilly, is a notable Democratic Party activist and veteran community organizer. As CRC discovered, Reilly was a delegate to the 2012 Democratic convention and was a past member of the state party’s executive committee. In 2007, he was a “field organizer” for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, a group that reportedly silenced McConnell by heckling him at a public event that year. Progress Kentucky was also accused of racism after its tweets mocked the Chinese ethnicity of McConnell’s wife, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao.

Project Vote deputy director Amy Busefink is lobbying Texas lawmakers in an effort to prevent state officials from verifying if Texas voters are registered in multiple states, J. Christian Adams reports at PJMedia.com. Of course, Busefink shouldn’t be anywhere near electoral integrity issues: she was convicted two years ago of being a voter-fraud ringleader during an ACORN voter drive in Las Vegas. That wasn’t the first time Busefink was involved in shady electoral dealings. Even while under indictment in Nevada she ran the 2010 national voter drive for Project Vote, which was President Obama’s employer in 1992. Project Vote and ACORN, which went bankrupt in 2010, had long been indistinguishable.

Read all »

Going Soft on Juvenile Crime: How the MacArthur and Casey foundations distort youth offender policies

By Fred Lucas (Organization Trends, May 2013) (PDF here)

Summary: Although the young still commit outrageous crimes, two multi-billion-dollar foundations have spent years working to make the juvenile justice system more lenient. Now the Obama Justice Department has also joined in the effort.

The family of Antonio Torres didn’t feel better after the January 24 sentencing of James Lee Allen, now 18. In 2011 Torres was murdered at the age of 42 by a group of four teenagers in Oakland, California. Prosecutors said the armed teens were “hunting” for someone to rob. They stole a gold chain and an iPod from Torres before fatally shooting him in the back as he tried to run away. Allen didn’t shoot the gun that killed Torres, but he was charged as an adult with murder and robbery for participating in the crime, the Oakland Tribune reported.

Allen ultimately pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 12 years, too short for the Torres family. “My concern is that he is going to come out [of prison] and hurt another family,” said Maria Torres. “They not only took my brother’s life away, they took a part of each of us.”

Some advocates would oppose ever trying these four offenders as adults, despite their horrific crime. Forget the question of whether 12 years is too light a sentence. These advocates do not want any incarceration for crimes committed by offenders under the age of 18, and their thinking has begun to influence our legal system.

Over the last eight years, the courts have made juvenile justice, even for the worst offenders, more and more lenient. This gradual evolution follows what Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has called, “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Those evolving standards have largely been driven by two left-wing philanthropies, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These two funders have battled the get-tough-on-crime approach of the 1990s and pushed for alternatives to incarceration for youth offenders. They have also opposed trying minors as adults. These organizations and their allies have had their way in abolishing the death penalty for juveniles (thanks to Justice Kennedy), and eliminating—in most cases—life sentences for youth murderers. They have also forged a tight-knit relationship with the Obama Justice Department and swayed the thinking of a majority of states across the country (red and blue) on the issue of crime and punishment for minors.

Read all »