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.
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.
Labor secretary nominee gave false sworn testimony
So say Christopher Coates and J. Christian Adams in a Washington Examiner op-ed.
Here it is:
Senators of both parties should be reluctant to confirm nominee Thomas E. Perez as Labor secretary because he has provided inaccurate testimony under oath.
The explosive report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz details the existence of an open and toxic hostility inside the DOJ toward bringing voting rights cases to protect white victims of discrimination. When Perez testified before the Civil Rights Commission in May 2010, he denied he had ever heard of any such hostility. His testimony was false.
We should know. We detailed this problem to Perez in his office the day before his testimony. We described the long and detailed history of hostility by many DOJ employees toward race-neutral enforcement of the voting rights laws if the victims of discrimination were white.
Media Matters quotes us
The George Soros-funded hate group, Media Matters for America, cited me in a new post.
It concerns President Obama’s off-the-charts radical nominee for Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez.
I’m not sure why MMfA writers Hannah Groch-Begley, Sergio Munoz, and Zachary Pleat bothered to do so.
As I correctly stated, the radical left-wing group Casa de Maryland is funded by George Soros and was funded by the late Hugo Chavez.
The MMfA post does not contradict what I wrote.
Washington Examiner changes business model
The Washington Examiner, which has published many op-eds from Capital Research Center staff, is going to be publishing weekly instead of daily.
An official press release:
30 Years of Junk Science: SDI to Hydraulic Fracturing
At the end of the day on Wednesday the Heritage Foundation is hosting a panel called, “30 Years of Junk Science: SDI to Hydraulic Fracturing.”
It features Capital Research Center contributors Kevin Mooney (Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity) and Diana Furchtgott-Roth (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research).
To RSVP or watch online go here.
Here’s the official blurb for the event:
On March 23, 1983, President Reagan called upon the scientific community to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” His Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposal looked to the very strengths of American ingenuity and technology that had achieved the unthinkable so many times before. Naysayers – from credentialed professionals to media darlings to political hacks – spared no quarter in their ridicule and belittling attacks. Time and again, junk science has been cited in an attempt to discredit, refute or condemn visionary ideas and processes. Join us as for an eye-opening review of the long trail of scare tactics and hyperbole so readily relied upon by the Left to push mere personal, special interest, or partisan agendas when opposing progress.
Briefly Noted: March 2013
President Obama has converted his campaign apparatus into a permanent in-your-face campaign aimed at furthering radical politics. Organizing for Action, a new 501(c)(4) advocacy group, will “play an active role” in “mobilizing around and speaking out in support of important legislation” during Obama’s second term, the president said. The group grew out of Organizing for America, an unincorporated project of the DNC that whipped up popular support for Obama’s policies. Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, is the new group’s national chairman, but day to day affairs will be run by executive director Jon Carson. A former White House aide, Carson has ties to ACORN and Project Vote and was previously chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, serving under the now-disgraced Van Jones.
Student activists with the radical anti-war group Code Pink receive college credit for disrupting congressional hearings, Code Pink leader Jodie Evans acknowledges. Evans made the admission after Lachelle Roddy, an intern at the group, was ejected from Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent confirmation hearing for shouting “I’m tired of my friends in the Middle East dying.” Roddy is a political science major at Hollins University, a small, private women’s college in Roanoke, Virginia (current annual cost: $43,295.00). Kerry refused to criticize his detractor, fondly recalling his own protest antics. “I respect the woman who was voicing her concerns about the world,” he said.
The George Soros-funded Center for American Progress is outraged that the National Rifle Association spends money to elect judges and state attorneys general who support the Second Amendment. The nerve! CAP writer Billy Corriher mocks the 22-year-old good government group, Law Enforcement Alliance of America, to which he says the NRA has given $6 million-plus since 2004, and calls it a “front group” that helps to elect politicians who turn a blind eye to “violations of gun-violence prevention laws.”
Philanthropy Notes: March 2013
President Obama finally found a few groups that he doesn’t want to give tax dollars. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has refused to provide aid to more than 200 houses of worship in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions affected by “Superstorm” Sandy, which made landfall in late October. But “there’s no constitutional reason why houses of worship, which often are the first to provide timely disaster relief to hard-hit communities, should be categorically banned from receiving relief funds to repair buildings. In fact, continuing the practice of allowing zoos and museums to obtain the funds while shutting out churches expresses precisely the kind of hostility toward religion that the Establishment Clause rejects,” said Daniel Bloomberg, legal counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
Nonprofit leaders warned lawmakers at a congressional hearing last month that tinkering with charitable deductions could have serious consequences, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. “Substantially limiting the charitable deduction at a time when people are still reeling from the recession, unemployment is high, and charities are facing government cutbacks simply makes no sense,” said David Wills, president of the National Christian Foundation, testifying on behalf of the Alliance for Charitable Reform. The House Ways and Means Committee heard that limiting the value of the charitable deduction would discourage giving and compel nonprofits to cut back on the services they provide to those in need. The committee created 11 working groups to prepare for the tax reform debate, including one focusing on charitable organizations.
Conservatives are still severely outgunned in the world of philanthropy, David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin write in their recent book, The New Leviathan (Random House). As of 2009, “the financial assets of the 115 major tax-exempt foundations of the Left identified by our researchers added up to $104.56 billion,” or 10 times greater than the financial assets of the 75 major foundations of the Right.
Obama to Nominate Sharia Supporter, Illegal Immigrant Advocate as Labor Secretary
President Obama reportedly intends to nominate in-your-face radical leftist lawyer Thomas Perez as his next Secretary of Labor.
Now an assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, Perez is a former top aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and possibly a perjurer.
Perez led the Obama administration’s assault on voter ID laws last year. As John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky report in Who’s Counting, as a member of the Montgomery County, Md., Council in 2003 he also tried to force governments to accept fraud-prone matricula consular ID cards issued by Mexican consular offices. He was a board member of Casa de Maryland, an advocacy group for illegal aliens funded by George Soros and the recently deceased Hugo Chavez.
Perez is apparently in favor of Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws. In Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries offenders can be condemned to death merely for insulting Islam.
Amazingly, at a congressional hearing last year, Perez pointedly declined to rule out bringing such laws to the United States. At the July 27, 2012, meeting of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution, Perez refused to say whether he would uphold the religious speech protections in the First Amendment in the future.
We Have Ted Cruz’s List: Harvard Law Really Is Littered with Communists
It turns out Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was correct when he claimed Harvard Law School had significant numbers of what might reasonably be called “communists.”
Anyone who knows the Ivy League knows the question shouldn’t be, Who at Harvard is Marxist? but Who at Harvard isn’t Marxist?
Cruz, a U.S. senator for almost two months now, made the offending statement in a speech almost three years ago. He described Barack Obama as “the most radical” president “ever to occupy the Oval Office.”
Obama “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School” because “there were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than communists!” said Cruz. “There was one Republican. But there were 12 who would say they were Marxists who believed in the communists’ overthrowing the United States government.”
Dan McLaughlin, a law school classmate of Cruz, confirms that the senator “is absolutely right on the basic point here: there were multiples more Marxists on the Harvard Law faculty at the time than open Republicans.”
Does any of this mean that Cruz believes actual dues-paying, card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) dominate the Harvard Law faculty? No, but he knows that Harvard, like so many institutions of higher learning across America, is infected with Marxist fellow travelers who are ideologically sympathetic to communism. To distinguish such people from actual CPUSA members, they are often referred to as small-c communists or neo-communists.
Like most Americans, Cruz wasn’t using the plural form of the word communist with the precision of a political theory scholar. He was referring to people who believe that markets are fundamentally unjust and that physical force should be used to create a classless society. They believe in extreme, forced equality and boring sameness at the expense of freedom and individual rights.
A Cruz spokeswoman later explained that her employer’s “substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ — a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism — and they far outnumbered Republicans.”
Left Tries To Divide Conservatives To Secure Immigration Amnesty
In the soul-searching saga that has followed Mitt Romney’s defeat in November, some leading Republicans claim that to stave off political oblivion the GOP must wholeheartedly embrace comprehensive immigration reform including amnesty for those illegal aliens already in the country.
This is wishful thinking, of course. According to various studies including a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report, pandering to Latino voters will not gain the Republican Party Hispanic-American votes. Latinos are particularly hard to win over to the Republican side because they tend to be ideologically aligned with big-government solutions traditionally associated with Democrats.
In other words, if conservatives embrace amnesty and all it entails, they get nada. Zero. Zip. The Left wins by getting a huge increase in the left-leaning portion of the electorate.
For liberals, there’s no downside at all. It’s a win-win as the Cloward-Piven Strategy of overwhelming the system is applied to immigration policy.
The National Immigration Forum (NIF), a media-savvy political shop largely underwritten by radical left-wing political manipulator George Soros, is attempting to dupe conservatives into supporting a massive immigration amnesty.