Monthly Notes

Philanthropy Notes: March 2015


Supporters of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign are becoming quite tired of requests to donate to her campaign when she still hasn’t gotten around to declaring that she is actually running, Politico reports. “I’m not going to be ready for Hillary until she announces she’s running for president,” said Mary Tetreau of Londonderry, N.H., a longtime Democrat who called the early-and-often email approach of the political action committee Ready for Hillary “annoying.” Democratic activist Bill Verge adds, “I’ll be ready for Hillary when Hillary’s ready for Hillary.” He considers himself a likely Clinton supporter who is turned off by what Politico calls the “aggressive fundraising on behalf of a candidate who appears intent on postponing an official entry into the race possibly until July.”

Fundraising professionals aren’t worried about alienating potential donors. “The best practice used to be that you would only send a couple per day at max,” said Michael Whitney, an email campaigning specialist at Revolution Messaging. Although email solicitors have become increasingly aggressive in recent years the feared backlash hasn’t materialized. The new consensus is that nonstop emailing “might annoy a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to unsubscribe and it doesn’t mean they’re not going to donate in the future.” “Three years ago, the idea of sending more than two emails a day was considered abusive,” Whitney said. “That’s gone out the window.”

The Obama administration is using taxpayer dollars to fund a radical anti-Israel group that aims to drive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from office in that country’s March parliamentary elections. The U.S.-based group receiving federal money, OneVoice International, in turn is working with V15, an “independent grassroots movement” in Israel, according to Ha’aretz. (The exact amount of the grants, which come from the U.S. Department of State, was not reported in the media.) V15’s unofficial motto is said to be “anyone but Bibi,” a reference to the prime minister’s nickname. OneVoice has hired Obama campaign aides such as Jeremy Bird of political consulting powerhouse 270 Strategies to take on Netanyahu’s Likud Party. Bird was national field director for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

A Boston-based hub of terrorism associated with a top Islamic State propagandist and producer of hostage-beheading videos was slated to receive the red carpet treatment at a White House anti-terrorism conference last month as this publication went to press. The terrorist-friendly Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), reportedly a front for Islamist terrorist groups, operates mosques in and around Boston and is sending officials to the “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.” Social media guru Ahmad Abousamra, who is now the chief propagandist for the Islamic State, regularly attended ISB’s Cambridge mosque. So did Boston marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

President Obama is running a massive illegal operation that issued 5.5 million work permits from 2009 through 2014 that were never authorized by Congress, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies. The report comes as Congress considers reversing some of Obama’s executive overreaches that reward illegal aliens with lawful status for breaking the nation’s immigration laws. The scheme uncovered by CIS “is a huge parallel immigrant work authorization system outside the limits set by Congress that inevitably impacts opportunities for U.S. workers, damages the integrity of the immigration system, and encourages illegal immigration,” according to Jessica M. Vaughan, CIS’s director of policy studies. CIS uncovered the existence of the scheme by obtaining statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under the Freedom of Information Act.

Matthew Vadum

The author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, 2011), Vadum, former senior vice president at CRC, writes and speaks widely…
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