Monthly Notes

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.”

In D.C., it’s who you know: The government of Iraq is hiring the Podesta Group to lobby on its behalf in Congress. Politico reports the firm was hired because of its ties to top Democrats. Principal Tony Podesta is the brother of John Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress who was also Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and co-chairman of the Obama-Biden transition team.

After publicly boasting that she voted twice in November, a left-wing Ohio activist associated with a Soros-funded group claims she did nothing wrong by double-voting. “There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Melowese Richardson, a longtime Cincinnati poll worker active in a local group called Communities United for Action. The group is part of a larger Saul Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA), which makes no bones about its desire to overthrow what remains of America’s free enterprise system. Through his Foundation to Promote Open Society, Soros has given NPA $300,000 since 2010.

The governing body of the American Bar Association, a guild long controlled by the Left, last month approved a resolution calculated to undermine private political association and free speech. According to the ABA, Resolution 110B urges Congress to require groups currently exempt from campaign disclosure requirements to publicly disclose the source of funds and the amounts spent. Left-wingers are infuriated that contributions and spending by 501(c)(4) nonprofits and 527 political organizations remain largely hidden from public view.

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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