Matthew Vadum
Veteran journalist Matthew Vadum edits Organization Trends and Foundation Watch. He previously worked in the Washington bureau of The Bond Buyer newspaper. While a reporter for the Central Penn Business Journal in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he won an award for outstanding legal journalism from the Pennsylvania Bar Association for an article that focused on employment law. He holds an M.A. in American Studies from Georgetown University. An expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Vadum's book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers," was published by WND Books in May 2011.
Briefly Noted: May 2013
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.
R Street Institute hires new media heavyweight
The R Street Institute, a pro-free market think tank based here in Washington, D.C., has hired the brilliant Zach Graves to serve in the newly created position of director of digital marketing.
Based in R Street’s headquarters, Graves will be responsible for the group’s online marketing, social media, blogger outreach and various other projects to elevate the organization’s brand in the digital space.
Prior to joining R Street, Graves was manager of new media at the Cato Institute where he had a very successful run overseeing Cato’s social media following across dozens of project feeds; outreach to bloggers and other think tanks for Cato’s policy research; online advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube.
Philanthropy Notes: May 2013
It appears author Steven J. Milloy of JunkScience.com was right when he quipped that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “owns” the American Lung Association (ALA). Taxpayer money may be indirectly financing lobbying campaigns aimed at banning smoking in public places. Since 2001, the EPA has given the ALA more than $20 million in grants, and the ALA, in turn, has been passing on grant money to local governments to encourage such bans. For example, smoking is now banned on the beaches of Fenwick Island, Delaware, after its town council accepted a grant from the ALA. Officials in nearby Dewey Beach are planning to ban smoking on their beaches, too, and are seeking money from the ALA to promote the ban.
“A blockbuster congressional investigation of campaign finance activities by corporations, trade associations, and high net worth individuals may be coming,” warns Covington & Burling, a law firm that focuses on election law. According to its latest report, not only 501(c)(4) groups and trade associations may be congressional targets, but also 501(c)(3) nonprofits. The chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), has announced he will “tackle … the use of secret money to fund political campaigns.” Levin is notoriously tough, and his new ranking member on the other side of the aisle is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is famous for his willingness to have Congress restrict political speech.
Media Matters’s Eric Boehlert Caught In A Lie, Falsely Accuses Weekly Standard of Ignoring Gosnell Abortion Trial
(crossposted from PJ Tatler)
As I’ve written before, the anti-conservative propaganda website, Media Matters for America, lies, distorts, and makes up things in order to make good Americans look bad.
A case in point is Eric Boehlert, a senior slime-purveyor at the George Soros-funded character assassination factory.
Boehlert, known for his sloppy research and typographical errors, is now trying to justify the mainstream media’s virtual blackout of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell by accusing conservative media outlets of ignoring the proceedings.
Specifically, Boehlert writes that the conservative Weekly Standard magazine only bothered covering the trial recently.
He notes that the April 22 print version contains an unsigned editorial on Gosnell titled “See No Evil,” and that the online version contains only two articles on Gosnell — “A House of Horrors,” by Gary Bauer (April 3) and “The Gosnell Scandal” by Jon A. Shields (April 10).
But in fact the Weekly Standard has published at least three other pieces on Gosnell dating back to 2011 and Gosnell has been mentioned in various items available in the online archive dozens of times.
Organizing for Action bags almost $5 million in 1Q
Organizing for Action just sent out a press release bragging that it raised almost $5 million in the first quarter of this year.
“In the first few months of this brand-new organization, 109,582 supporters stepped up and invested in what we’re building together — from the grassroots up.”
The average donation was $44. (If you multiply $44 by 109,582 you get $4,821,608.)
Organizing for Action will “play an active role” in “mobilizing around and speaking out in support of important legislation” during Obama’s second term, the president said in January.
The group, which sprang out of Obama’s reelection campaign, urges supporters to get in others’ faces. Its leader, Jon Carson, says OfA’s most important immediate priorities are “immigration reform, reducing gun violence, and tackling the budget in a balanced way.”
Progress Kentucky has close ties to Democratic Party
I have a news article at the Daily Caller today.
Contrary to the established mainstream media narrative, the left-wing organization reported to be behind the alleged illegal wiretapping of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office is not an independent group but one with close ties to the Democratic Party.
Shawn Reilly, the executive director of Progress Kentucky, the controversial super PAC allegedly involved in the recording, is a notable Democratic Party activist and veteran community organizer.
Read the article here.
Leftists Off-Message: Liberal Think Tank Praises Maggie Thatcher
(originally posted at The Spectacle)
As the explosion of left-wing apoplexy unleashed by the passing of Margaret Thatcher intensifies, it appears the tilting-to-port Century Foundation didn’t get the memo from the activist left.
Harold Pollack of the New York-based Century Foundation is lauding the late British prime minister for her trailblazing response to the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. He writes:
The Thatcher government responded rather effectively and humanely to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Embracing harm reduction measures such as syringe exchange and methadone maintenance, it saved thousands of lives. Indeed the words ‘harm reduction,’ anathema to American drug control policy until the Obama administration, were official watchwords of British drug policy.
Of course much of the rest of Pollack’s post is ahistorical drivel in which the writer regurgitates one of the Left’s most successful lies in recent decades, to wit, that the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations did nothing to combat HIV/AIDS.
Still, the left-wing attacks on the United Kingdom’s greatest leader since Winston Churchill seem misplaced. Thatcher was one of the few Members of the Westminster Parliament to vote to decriminalize homosexuality and to liberalize abortion.
The Century Foundation, by the way, was founded in 1919 by department store magnate Edward Filene. The nonprofit group describes itself as a “progressive non-partisan think tank.” It is funded by pillars of the left-wing philanthropic establishment, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Carnegie Corp. of New York, Ford Foundation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund Inc.
The Century Foundation is so far left that its board of trustees includes Melissa Harris-Perry, the Marxist luminary who recently attacked the idea that parents should be the sole arbiters of how their children are raised.
Briefly Noted: April 2013
Organizing for Access? Critics from left to right say President Obama’s newly incorporated 501(c)(4) community organizing group, Organizing for Action, has been selling access to the president through the group, which accepts unlimited individual donations. The Daily Caller reports that access to the Obama White House can be purchased by donors for $500,000. At a press briefing, White House press secretary Jay Carney declined to deny the report. The group grew out of Organizing for America, an unincorporated project of the Democratic National Committee that whipped up popular support for Obama’s policies.
Finally! Weeks after left-wing activist Melowese Richardson boasted on television that she voted multiple times for president in November, authorities in Cincinnati, Ohio, charged her with voter fraud. The now-indicted 58-year-old veteran poll worker is facing eight counts of voter fraud in total, going all the way back to 2008. Richardson is a member of Communities United for Action, which is part of a larger Saul Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA) that makes no bones about its desire to overthrow what remains of America’s free enterprise system.
Philanthropy Notes: April 2013
Influential House Ways and Means Committee member Rep. David Reichert (R-Wash.) told the Chronicle of Philanthropy he opposes putting a cap on the charitable deduction because doing so “would negatively affect giving.” President Obama has proposed placing a 28-percent ceiling on the deduction, but such a limit would have the effect of “raising taxes and therefore raise revenue to pay for government spending,” Reichert says. “I think that the money is better off in private hands.”
Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wisc.) introduced legislation that would give volunteers who drive their own cars to do charity work the same tax benefits for mileage reimbursements as people who drive as part of their paid jobs at a business. The proposed “Charitable Driving Tax Relief Act” would also scrap the rule that charities report mileage reimbursements to the Internal Revenue Service.
Brandon Darby on Andrew Breitbart: ‘I can’t even begin to describe what he did in my life’
The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas interviewed leftist-turned-patriot Brandon Darby as part of her “Leaders” series.
Here’s the text from the post as lifted from the Daily Caller:
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, former progressive Brandon Darby discussed his unlikely friendship with the late conservative media icon Andrew Breitbart.
Darby became an FBI informant and testified in court about the conspiracy to bomb the 2008 GOP convention with homemade Molotov cocktails.
“This guy calls me, and he says, ‘My name is Andrew Breitbart, and you bought a truck from my friend. I hope you don’t mind that I’m calling you.’ And I’m like, ‘What’s up, man?’ And he said, ‘Well, thank you for what you did.’ And I said, ‘That’s really strange, Andrew, that you would say that, because no one other than FBI agents and a couple of people who would be firebombed have said that.”
“I can’t even begin to describe what he did in my life,” Darby said of Breitbart.
Catch the upcoming interview between Brandon Darby and The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas all this week.