At PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a new post on a gun-control group’s complaint that the federal budget doesn’t have enough loose change in it to grease the “bribes” necessary to buy the votes of Members of Congress.
“Bribery isn’t what it once was,” said an official with one of the major gun-control groups. “The government has no money. Once upon a time you would throw somebody a post office or a research facility in times like this. Frankly, there’s not a lot of leverage.”
Mayor Bloomberg also comes in for criticism. Read the full post here.
Over at PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a piece on two scandals breaking out in North Carolina. The first scandal involves thousands of improper voter registrations in a scam that was duplicated in all 50 states this election cycle. The second concerns left-wing nonprofits in the state, whose secret strategy to attack leading conservative office-holders was leaked. Even the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which is North Carolina’s answer to the Ford Foundation, was gravely embarrassed, and the state GOP has filed formal complaints with the IRS and the State Board of Elections (SBE). Unfortunately, the SBE is at the center of the voter registration scandal:
The SBE general counsel wrote Civitas September 26, 2012, to assure them, “We were not contacted by any campaign, candidate, legislator, or political party” regarding registration. Yet the firm that SBE allowed to conduct “web-based” registrations brags on its website’s front page that its clients include “Presidential campaigns,” and its clients page lists “Obama for President Draft Committee.”
Aryeh Neier, who has led George Soros’s network of philanthropies for 18 years, said he will retire as president of the Open Society Foundations in April next year when he turns 75.
Neier was instrumental in turning Soros’s charitable organizations into formidable instruments for anti-Americanism and nihilistic destruction worldwide. “It will undoubtedly be a new era,” the Chronicle of Philanthropy quotes Soros saying. “We have had a very productive relationship: two different characters, two different types of people, each respecting the other and having a creative tension between us. This will be disrupted by his departure.”
Stacy McCain reports that Van Jones intimate Arianna Huffington, fresh off her lucrative Huffington Post deal with AOL, now wants even more people to blog for her for free.
I found yet another reason for conservatives to hate the budget deal.
The compromise spending legislation funds ACORN-like radical activist groups to the tune of a whopping $680 million in fiscal 2011.
Bear in mind $680 million is virtually nothing compared to the trillions of dollars the feds regularly flush down the toilet but these nasty, parasitic pressure groups that want to bring “hope and change” to America can do a lot of damage to our society with that money. They’ve been trying to transform America for the worst and using your tax dollars to do so ever since left-of-center community groups started getting government funding under Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”
As Suzanne Perry reports in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Community Services Block Grants program is on track to take in a good chunk of change.
The program, which provides money to a network of community-action agencies across the country, would get $680-million for the fiscal year that ends September 30, according to details of the bill provided by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
As I detail in my upcoming book, Subversion Inc., President Obama always takes care of his friends.
The Community Services Block Grant program provides federal money ”to states and organizations for projects that offer education, employment, health care, housing, and other services to low-income people,” according to Perry. “Most of that money goes to about 1,000 community-action agencies across the country that manage local antipoverty projects.”
It might as well be called the “Saul Alinsky Memorial Slush Fund.”
And get this: budding Alinskyite class warriors can even earn a diploma in rabble-rousing! Community Action Partnership offers “Certified Community Action Professional,” or CCAP designations, to today’s community organizers.
Maybe it’s a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval for left-wing thugs.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a new article on the fallout from James O’Keefe’s skillfully engineered undercover video takedown of NPR.
Here’s the passage that quotes me:
But some conservatives see Mr. O’Keefe and his associates as “folk heroes” for helping to put Acorn out of business, says Matthew Vadum, senior editor at Capital Research Center, a right-leaning philanthropy watchdog. While Acorn helped some people over the years, he says, its leaders followed a leftist philosophy of “attack the system by any means necessary,” he says. (The group often staged confrontational protests against banks and other businesses.)
Mr. O’Keefe’s video stings are “politically motivated,” he adds, “but I would still consider them to be journalism.”
A few days after former far-left activist Brandon Darby filed suit against the New York Times for libel, the newspaper has issued a retraction regarding the offending article. Darby helped to undermine an anarchist plot to attack the 2008 Republican national convention yet a New York Times article accused him of being part of the plot.
In today’s paper appears the following correction:
An article on Feb. 23 about developments in the investigation of a 2008 arson fire at the Texas governor’s mansion misstated the role played by an F.B.I. informer, Brandon Darby, in an earlier case in Minnesota. In that case, two men were accused of making and possessing gasoline bombs at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in 2008. Both men eventually pleaded guilty. Initially, however, one of them implicated Mr. Darby, saying Mr. Darby had persuaded him to make the bombs. He later conceded that Mr. Darby had not entrapped him. (Go to Article)
I wrote about the lawsuit recently in the Daily Caller. Read the article here. I provide more details about the plot and its aftermath in my new book, Subversion Inc.
I wrote an op-ed recently for the Washington Times that was well received.
It’s about Marxist academic and activist Frances Fox Piven who has called for bloody revolution against the U.S. government for decades.
Here are the top paragraphs from the article:
If you promote violent leftist insurrection for a living, should you be surprised when anonymous members of the public threaten you with violence?
Apparently.
Take the case of Marxist professor and community organizer Frances Fox Piven, a frequent target of conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck.
In the Nation magazine just last month, Ms. Piven expressed outrage that Wall Street bankers weren’t being dragged from their homes and led to the guillotine because of the country’s high unemployment rates and an anemic economy. “So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent,” she wrote.
Ms. Piven‘s next words ought to send a chill down the spine of every American.
“Local protests have to accumulate and spread – and become more disruptive – to create serious pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.”
Shocked staffers at the Nation report that the publication’s website has been flooded with angry comments, expletives and unprintable threats against Ms. Piven‘s person.
But instead of recognizing the root causes of this backlash, Occidental College professor and activist Peter Dreier points his finger at Mr. Beck, Ms. Piven‘s most persistent critic. Mr. Beck has railed against Ms. Piven almost daily on his cable TV show for the past two years, calling her “an enemy of the Constitution.”
It is a harsh but nonetheless accurate epithet directed at someone who sees the Constitution as an inconvenient obstacle standing in the way of socialist utopia. [...]