By Matthew Vadum |
April 17, 2013, 4:02 PM EDT
(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.
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By Matthew Vadum |
April 12, 2013, 10:17 PM EDT
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.”
By Matthew Vadum |
April 12, 2013, 6:49 PM EDT
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.
By Matthew Vadum |
April 11, 2013, 12:49 PM EDT
(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.
By Scott Walter |
April 10, 2013, 4:53 PM EDT
At PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a piece on the disturbing fact that multi-billion-dollar foundations fund “population control” and “reproductive health services” but are silent about China’s war on women, even though that nation’s “One Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth.”
The whole story is here.
By Scott Walter |
April 5, 2013, 12:25 PM EDT
Over at PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a new piece on Sen. Carl Levin’s plan to open an investigation that will target giving to conservative political causes, especially by corporations. Unions, the administration’s asleep-at-the-switch Department of Labor, and left-wing activists have little to fear.
Read the full story here.
By Matthew Vadum |
April 3, 2013, 10:15 AM EDT
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.
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By CRC Staff |
April 3, 2013, 6:30 AM EDT
The Carnegie Corporation of New York: From building libraries to undermining American society
By Kirk MacDonald, Foundation Watch, April 2013 (PDF here)
Summary: The Carnegie Corporation is the largest single philanthropy created by Andrew Carnegie, whose own life is a tribute to the possibilities of the American dream. Yet thanks to the lack of guidance Carnegie gave the Corporation, it soon betrayed his own views and began eroding the very system that made his success possible.
Famed steel entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911. The enterprise was such a labor of love for the self-made man that one of his trustees, Henry S. Pritchett, later joked that Carnegie had “simply incorporated himself.” Though called a corporation, it was a grant-making institution that today would be called a foundation.
Its total assets as of Sept. 30, 2011, were $2.5 billion, and that fiscal year it made a total of 258 grants worth $93.2 million, according to the latest financial information available at www.carnegie.org. From its original endowment of $135 million (roughly $2 billion in current U.S. dollars), the Corporation has provided grants totaling over $1.4 billion.
The Carnegie Corporation’s current president is Vartan Gregorian, who previously served as president of the New York Public Library and of Brown University. In 2010, WND.com reported that while at Brown, Gregorian served on the selection committee of the Annenberg Foundation, which funded activist Bill Ayers’s Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $49.2 million, two-to-one matching challenge grant over five years. WND also reported Gregorian was “central” in Ayers’s recruitment of Barack Obama to serve as the project’s first chairman. In 2009, President Obama named Gregorian to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. Gregorian has received honors and awards from Obama’s predecessors, too, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush.
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By CRC Staff |
April 1, 2013, 11:53 AM EDT
Shadow Network: A leaked strategy memo reveals a powerful, and partisan, network of left-wing nonprofits
By Susan Myrick, Organization Trends, April 2013 (PDF here)
Summary: Thanks to a leaked strategy memo, the inner workings of the Left have been revealed in North Carolina. Dozens of nonprofits have colluded to make personal assaults on their political foes and to subvert state voting laws.
The veil of secrecy that shrouds left-wing nonprofits in North Carolina was recently shredded with the public exposure of a shocking memo. Thanks to this leak, the public can see how these organizations collaborate and employ highly coordinated hardball tactics to achieve their goals, hoping to undermine elected officials and apparently defying the law. For once, we have proof of something long suspected: left-wing nonprofits wield an alarming amount of power in the media, state politics, and government.
Just a few weeks ago the Charlotte Observer broke the story of the leaked strategy memo that described the game plan that “progressive” groups should use to attack the Republican Governor and leaders in the Republican-majority House and Senate. The memo would not be so unusual, if it had been written by and for a political party.
But a political party didn’t write it. Instead, it was circulated by a nonprofit organization, Blueprint North Carolina, that acts as a coordinating group for the state’s Left. The strategy memo was presented to a group of left-wing nonprofits at a Blueprint North Carolina meeting, and to the best of our knowledge was developed and written by at least one of those nonprofits.
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By Matthew Vadum |
April 1, 2013, 11:13 AM EDT
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.
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