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.

President Obama’s latest advocacy group, Organizing for Action (OfA), raised almost $5 million in the first quarter of this year. Since it was created in January, 109,582 supporters have donated an average of $44, announced the leftist group, which was formerly known as Organizing for America. The group sprang out of Obama’s re-election campaign and now 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.”

The left-leaning Century Foundation of New York distinguished itself from the angry socialist horde by not attacking former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher when she died last month at 87. Harold Pollack praised Thatcher for responding “rather effectively and humanely to the HIV/AIDS crisis” when the disease arrived on the scene in the 1980s. Alas, much of the rest of Pollack’s article is ahistorical nonsense 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. The Century Foundation is so far left that its board of trustees includes MSNBC host and professor Melissa Harris-Perry, who recently attacked the idea that parents should be the sole arbiters of how their children are raised.

Convicted cop killer and Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin is now teaching as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s notorious School of Social Work. Boudin serves as director of the school’s “Criminal Justice Initiative,” and she was also recently named the Rose Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence by New York University Law School. Boudin served 22 years in prison for her role in a $1.6 million robbery of an armored-car that left two police officers and a Brinks security guard dead and nine children without fathers. She also has longstanding ties to Columbia, having plotted in 1970 to plant bombs in Butler Library on the university’s Morningside Heights campus.