MEDIA TRANSPARENCY
Sign-up for our newsletter
Only registered visitors are allowed to email content or post comments
Your help is essential to this website
SEARCHING
Find out where the grant data comes from, and what years and philanthropies are included.
Information, tips and tricks for making your search more successful
Search
Grants – search grants based on their
stated purpose
Recipients – search all grants to
a particular recipient
Funders – search for organizations or
individuals that are funding grants
People – search for people who benefit
from grant funds
Website – search the website for specific
text
Advanced search – specifiy multiple
criteria
All-in-one search – search the website
and the database at the same time for specific text
Using MT on a Palm, BlackBerry, or Windows CE device? Try our pda version of this website.
|
ORIGINAL RESEARCH | pages
1 2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Right Wing foundation-funded anti-environmental think tank grabbing a wider audience for 'free market environmentalism'
On the 15th anniversary of Terry Anderson and Donald Leal's book "Free Market Environmentalism" -- the seminal book on the subject -- Anderson, the Executive Director of the Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC - formerly known as the Political Economy Research Center) spoke in late-January at an event sponsored by Squaw Valley Institute at the Resort at Squaw Creek in California. While it may have been just another opportunity to speak on "free market environmentalism" and not the kickoff of a "victory tour," nevertheless it comes at a time when PERC's ideas are taking root.
In a story written just before Anderson's northern California appearance, Truckee Today's Karen Sloan described PERC as an organization that "contends that private property rights encourage good stewardship of natural resources." The story, headlined "'Enviroprenuer' scholar to speak at Resort at Squaw Creek," pointed out that "PERC scholars argue that government subsidies often degrade the environment, that market incentives can spur individuals to conserve and protect the environment and that polluters should be liable for the harm they cause others."
On its website, PERC -- a non-profit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1980 -- calls itself "the nation's oldest and largest institute dedicated to original research that brings market principles to resolving environmental problems." PERC maintains that it "pioneered the approach known as free market environmentalism."
Read the full report >
During recent visit, President’s brother describes the country as a 'kind of tribal democracy'
In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country's Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch "said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights." In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper, Bush described the country as "a kind of tribal democracy."
Neil Mallon Bush, the son of President George H. W. Bush and the brother of President George W. Bush, attended the forum to renew old family friendships and to drum up a little business for his educational software company. "The Jeddah Economic Forum has been very productive," Bush told Arab News. "I have been to this conference four times since 2002. I have seen it develop from the very beginning. There was less participation in the past, now there is more international participation."
These days, Neil Bush is the chairman and CEO of Ignite Learning, a company devoted to developing technology-assisted curriculum. Ignite calls it COW: "Curriculum on Wheels." In an interview with Arab News' Siraj Wahab, Bush talked enthusiastically about his company's mission: "We are building a model in the United States for developing curriculum that is engaging to grade-school kids, and our model is to deploy this engaging content through a device. So it is easy for any teacher to use our device through projectors and speakers. The curriculum is loaded on the device. We use animation and video and those kinds of things to light up learning in classrooms for kids. It helps teachers connect with their kids. We are planning to develop an Arabic version of that model."
A video on Ignite!'s website makes clear the enervating, rote approach to learning taken by the Bush family. While this may not be an advance in actual education, it does serve to enrich Neil Bush and commodify teachers. In concept it is much like Channel One, whereby Chris Whittle enriched himself forcing millions of primary school students to watch repackaged TV News sandwiched between corporate advertising.
Read the full report >
American Enterprise Institute "Scholar" and former House Speaker blames media for poll showing 64 percent of the American people wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances
 Whatever it is that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come to represent in American politics, the guy is nothing less than fascinating. One day he's espousing populist rhetoric about the need to cut the costs of college tuition and the next day he's talking World War III. One day he's claiming that the "war on terror" may force the abridgement of fundamental first amendment rights and the next he's advancing a twenty-first century version of his Contract with America. At the same time he's publicly proclaiming how "stupid" it is that the race for the presidency has already started you know that he's trying to figure out how to out finesse Rudy, McCain and Romney for the nomination. And last week, when Fox News' Chris Wallace cited a poll showing that 64 percent of the public would never vote for him, he was quick to blame those results on how unfairly he was treated by the mainstream media back in the day.
These days, Gingrich, who is simultaneously a "Senior Fellow" at the American Enterprise Institute and a "Distinguished Visiting Fellow" at the Hoover Institution, is making like your favorite uncle, fronting a YouTube video contest offering "prizes" to whoever creates the best two-minute video on why taxes suck. Although the prizes may not be particularly attractive to the typical YouTuber, nevertheless Gingrich recently launched the "Winning the Future, Goose that laid the Golden Egg, You Tube Contest." According to Newt.org, participants are to "Create a 120 second video explaining why tax increases will hurt the American economy, leading to less revenue for the government, not more. Or in other words, explain why we shouldn't cook the goose that laid the golden eggs (the American economy) by raising taxes."
Although he hasn't formerly announced his candidacy -- and he probably won't anytime soon -- Gingrich definitely has his eyes on the White House. He's just still figuring out how he will get there. Over the past several months Gingrich has been ubiquitous on the media and political scenes.
Read the full report >
Despite wrongheaded predictions about the war on Iraq, neocons are on the frontlines advocating military conflict with Iran
 After doing such a bang up job with their advice and predictions about the outcome of the war on Iraq, would it surprise you to learn that America's neoconservatives are still in business? While at this time we are not yet seeing the same intense neocon invasion of our living rooms -- via cable television's news networks -- that we saw during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, nevertheless, a host of policy analysts at conservative think tanks -- most notably the American Enterprise Institute -- are being heeded on Iran by those who count - folks inside the Bush Administration.
Long before the Bush Administration began escalating its rhetoric and upping the ante about the supposed "threat" posed to the US by Iran, well-paid inside-the-beltway think tankers were agitating for some kind of action against that country. Some have argued for ratcheting up sanctions and freezing bank accounts, others have advocated increasing financial aid to opposition groups, and still others have argued that a military strike at Iran's nuclear facilities is absolutely essential. For all, the desired end result is regime change in Iran.
If President Bush plunges the U.S. into some kind of military conflict with Iran, you can thank the Washington, D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a key player in the current debate over Iran.
President Bush acknowledged as much when he recently appeared at the AEI for a much-publicized speech on his War on Terror, which focused on the front in Afghanistan.
Read the full report >
Unmentioned in the president's State of the Union speech, the program nevertheless continues to recruit religious participants and hand out taxpayer money to religious groups
 With several domestic policy proposals unceremoniously folded into President Bush's recent State of the Union address, two pretty significant items failed to make the cut. Despite the president's egregiously tardy response to the event itself, it was nevertheless surprising that he didn't even mention Hurricane Katrina: He didn't offer up a progress report, words of hope to the victims, or come up with a proposal for moving the sluggish rebuilding effort forward. There were no "armies of compassion" ready to be unleashed, although it should be said that many in the religious community responded to the disaster much quicker than the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union address, however, there was no "compassionate conservatism" for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
The other item that didn't get any State of the Union play is a project that was once envisioned to be the centerpiece of the president's domestic agenda: his faith-based initiative. As Joseph Bottum, editor of the conservative publication First Things -- "The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life" -- pointed out, Bush "didn't mention faith-based initiatives, which...[he] once claimed would be his great legacy."
The president's faith-based initiative is facing several tough court battles.
Read the full report >
On the outs with the GOP, legendary degrader of discourse is moving to California
He doesn't make great art; nothing he does elevates the human spirit; he doesn't illuminate, he bamboozles. He has become expert in subterfuge, hidden meanings, word play and manipulation. Frank Luntz has been so good at what he does that those paying close attention gave it its own name: "Luntzspeak."
In a 10-page addendum to his new book ""Words that Work -- It's Not What You Say Its What People Hear," Luntz, formerly a top political pollster for the Republican Party, may have written so critically of the party's recent efforts that he has become persona non grata. Luntz used to be one of the party's go-to-guys for political guidance and strategy, a counselor to such GOP stalwarts as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former New York City Major Rudy Giuliani and Trent Lott.
"The Republican Party that lost those historic elections was a tired, cranky shell of the articulate reformist, forward-thinking movement that was swept into office in 1994 on a wave of positive change," Luntz wrote. According to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, Luntz went on to say that the Republicans of 2006 "were an ethical morass, more interested in protecting their jobs than protecting the people they served. The 1994 Republicans came to 'revolutionize' Washington. Washington won."
Read the full report >
Fueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director
As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Flash forward some 30-plus years and an Internet entrepreneur believes that it is time for a new conservative movement. He too has seen an entity on the left he admires enough to want to emulate: MoveOn.org.
"The left has been brilliant at leveraging technology," said Rod Martin, founder of TheVanguard.org, "and so have we to a point: our bloggers and news sites are amazing, and the RNC's get-out-the-vote software is unparalleled. But no one on our side has even begun to create anything like MoveOn. And after 2006, if we want to survive, much less build a long-term conservative majority, we better start, and fast."
Read the full report >
Founder and Chair of the American Civil Rights Institute scouting five to nine states for new anti-affirmative action initiatives
Fresh from his most recent victory -- in Michigan this past November -- Ward Connerly, the Black California-based maven of anti-affirmative action initiatives, appears to be preparing to take his jihad on the road. According to a mid-December report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Connerly said that he was "exploring moves into nine other states."
During a mid-December conference call Connerly allowed that he had scheduled visits to Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah during the upcoming months to get a handle on how many campaigns he might launch.
"Twenty-three states have systems for putting laws directly before voters in the form of ballot initiatives," the Chronicle pointed out. "Three down and 20 to go," Connerly boasted. "We don't need to do them all, but if we do a significant number, we will have demonstrated that race preferences are antithetical to the popular will of the American people."
"The people of California, Washington and Michigan have shown that institutions that implement these [affirmative action] programs are living on borrowed time," Connerly said.
Read the full report >
The Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics
 These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.
Now, Tancredo, who has represented the state's Sixth District since 1999, has joined the long list of candidates contending for the GOP's 2008 presidential nomination. In mid-January Tancredo announced the formation of an exploratory committee -- Tom Tancredo for a Secure America -- the first step to formally declaring his candidacy. While his announcement didn't cause quite the stir as the announcement by Illinois Democratic Senator Barak Obama that he too was forming an exploratory committee, nevertheless Tancredo's move did not go completely unnoticed.
While voters' concerns over the war in Iraq and the GOP's "culture of corruption" predominated in the 2006 midterms, Tancredo will be doing his best to make immigration an issue for the presidential campaign of 2008.
Read the full report >
New report from conservative foundation-funded IRD charges the NCC with being a political surrogate for MoveOn.org, People for the American Way and other liberal organizations
If you prefer your religious battles sprinkled with demagoguery, sanctimoniousness, and simplistic attacks, the Institute on Religion and Democracy's (IRD) latest broadside against the National Council of Churches (NCC) certainly fits the bill.
For those who remember a similar IRD-led attack on the World Council of Churches two decades ago the IRD's latest blast appears to be -- to borrow a phrase from New York Yankee great Yogi Berra -- "déjà vu all over again."
The IRD excoriated the World Council of Churches (WCC) for allegedly being tools of the anti-American left over its support of the Nelson Mandela-led African National Congress in South Africa, and its opposition to President Ronald Reagan's contra wars in Central America; wars that destabilized governments and were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. And now it is doing a similar job on the NCC.
"The institute, a Washington-based think tank, is allied with conservative groups on issues such as same-sex marriage. From its founding in 1981, its primary effort has been to challenge what it calls the 'leftist' political positions of mainline Protestant denominations, such as the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)," the Washington Post recently reported.
Author and longtime right wing watcher Frederick Clarkson recently described the IRD as an "inside the beltway, neoconservative agency [that] has waged a war of attrition against the historic mainline protestant churches in the U.S."
Read the full report >
"Consistent with Christian teachings" deal would allow amnesty of illegals here who are relatives of citizens
After months of being missing in action from the debate on the issue, a group of Christian conservatives are now staking out a position on immigration. Families First on Immigration, a coalition led by former Republican Party presidential hopeful Gary Bauer, who heads up a group called American Values, former Bush advisor to Catholic voters, Deal Hudson of the Morley Institute for Church & Culture, and David Keene of the American Conservative Union, are advancing what they call religiously grounded positions on immigration.
In early January, Families First on Immigration sent letters to President George W. Bush and to leaders of the new Democratic controlled Congress urging them "to adopt a grand compromise on the divisive issue that includes strong border security, an amnesty for illegals already here who are relatives of citizens and an end to birthright citizenship," the Washington Times reported.
"Our position really is consistent with Christian teachings and with the rule of law," said Manuel Miranda, chairman of the Third Branch Conference (as of January 9, the group's website "is currently under construction") a coalition of over 150 grasstop leaders, who has brought together more than 30 top shelf conservatives on this issue.
"Out of concern for keeping families together, the religious leaders propose granting citizenship to any illegal aliens in the country who are related to U.S. citizens. This would include anyone who has had a child born here, often referred to as an 'anchor baby,'" the Washington Times reported.
"In return, the federal government would end birthright citizenship, which automatically grants U.S. citizenship to anyone born here, regardless of his parents' legal status. The 14th Amendment says 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States ... are citizens of the United States.'"
Read the full report >
At ironically named 'Ethics and Public Policy Center' former senator will track 'America's Enemies'
If you thought that his resounding defeat at the polls this past November would send former Senator Rick Santorum scurrying back home to Pennsylvania, think again. Santorum has decided he'll be staying in the nation's capital to head up a new program called "America's Enemies," which will be located at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a Washington-based think tank formerly headed by Neocon hawk Elliott Abrams.
According to a statement issued by the Center headlined "Rick Santorum Joins Ethics and Public Policy Center, Establishes Program on America's Enemies," the project will study "threats posed to America and the West from a growing array of anti-Western forces that are increasingly casting a shadow over our future and violating religious liberty around the world."
"As a United States Senator, Rick Santorum was a champion of efforts to counter the threat of radical Islamic fascism, to protect victims of religious persecution, and to promote democracy and religious liberty around the world," said EPPC President Ed Whelan. "We are honored that he is joining EPPC to continue his important and courageous work on these matters."
Read the full report >
With an expected $500 million from a handful of megadonors, George W. Bush's 'truest believers' plan the mother of all presidential libraries and conservative think tanks
After six years of incompetence and cronyism, a failed war against terrorism, the quagmire that is Iraq, wars against science, the environment, corporate regulation and the public's right-to-know, a chummy working relationship with the country's most reactionary conservative evangelical Christians, a politicized faith-based initiative, giveaways to the energy industry, tax relief for the wealthy, a culture of corruption culminating in the forced resignations and imprisonment of some of the administrations key soldiers, and an attack on fundamental democratic rights and values, the Bush Administration is hatching plans to celebrate itself with a $500 million library (the costliest presidential library ever) to be built sometime after the end of Bush's second term.
In what is being called "their final campaign," Bush's "truest believers" are aiming to raise a half-billion dollars for the mother of all presidential libraries. The library and an attached think tank -- which will pay for conservative research -- is being earmarked for the Dallas, Texas campus of Southern Methodist University (SMU), where First Lady Laura Bush is an alumna and trustee.
Inside Higher Ed recently pointed out that SMU, which had been competing for the library with Baylor University and the University of Dallas, appears to have cleared the final hurdle to getting the project when the university "won a court fight over its right to demolish a condo complex the university had purchased, in part to have land for the Bush project."
That was before university faculty, administration, and staff questioned the ideological underpinnings of the project.
Read the full report >
Kansas Republican Senator starts off his bid for GOP's presidential nomination by courting the religious right
 Although he hasn't yet cracked double figures in early GOP presidential preference polls, Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback has achieved at least three things since announcing the formation of his 2008 presidential exploratory committee. He has set up the Brownback For President website, rounded up 20 or so high-profile folks for his exploratory committee, and he has adopted a catch phrase that he hopes will separate him from the stack of conservative competitors in the field.
"I have decided, after much prayerful consideration, to consider a bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency," Brownback said in a statement. "There is a real need in our country to rebuild the family and renew our culture and there is a need for genuine conservatism and real compassion in the national discussion."
"Despite his strong appeal among Protestant evangelicals and his Methodist roots, Brownback converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002 with the support of Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., another prominent social conservative," the Associated Press pointed out in early December. "He says his faith guides his opposition to abortion, gay marriage and embryonic stem cell research."
"Brownback's faith also leads him to tackle social injustice around the world. He's spearheaded legislation to fight genocide in Sudan, cut down human slave trafficking and prison recidivism."
All of which leads to Brownback calling himself a "full scale conservative."
Read the full report >
Is the twenty-first century evangelical entrepreneur ready for prime time?
The recent announcement by Joel Hunter, the senior pastor of the nondenominational Longwood, Florida-based Northland Church, also known as Northland A Church Distributed, and a founder of both Christian Citizen and the Alliance for the Distributed Church, that he would not be assuming the presidency of the Christian Coalition in early January -- brought Jason Christy back into the news.
Commenting on the Hunter situation, Christy, who in September 2005 had been named executive director of the organization only to resign a month later, said that it was clear that the Coalition had "picked the wrong captain for the wrong ship." He told the Washington Post that the title of Hunter's book -- "Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won't Fly With Most Conservative Christians" -- "alone tells me that they did not do their due diligence."
Read the full report >
While Black voters continue to reject the Republican Party, conservative Black ministers such as Bishop Harry R. Jackson are looking to Black mega-churches for GOP converts
Despite the calculated outreach efforts by the Bush Administration -- spearheaded by Ken Mehlman, the former head of the Republican National Committee -- to turn the Black vote, exit polling from the 2006 election showed that close to 90 percent of Black voters stayed firmly with Democratic Party candidates. And, although the GOP fielded what they thought were several attractive Black candidates for state-wide races around the country -- former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Lynn Swann ran for governor in Pennsylvania, Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele contended for that state's vacated Senate seat, and Ohio's Secretary of State, and longtime party activist, Kenneth Blackwell was that state's GOP gubernatorial candidate -- the Party failed to win any of those contests. (Swann received 13 percent of the Black vote; Steele received 25 percent; and Ohio's Blackwell received only 20 percent of the Black vote.)
Once again the GOP failed to gain traction within the Black community.
"The Black vote played a critical role in the outcome of a number of closely contested elections, especially for the U.S. Senate," David A. Bositis pointed out in his report titled "Blacks and the 2006 Midterm Elections." Bositis, a Senior Research Associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, noted that while national turnout of Black voters was "up slightly" from the 2002 midterm elections, "it was strategically effective in several places, although not enough in others."
Read the full report >
Partially funded by conservative foundations, the legal advocacy group is at the hub of fighting for the re-segregation of America
In early December several hundred pro-affirmative action demonstrators carrying signs reading "Fight for Equality" gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court to stand in witness to an historic occasion. For the first time since the ground breaking 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, when the Supreme Court ruled against separate but equal in America's public schools, the justices were hearing a case that could test that landmark ruling.
According to the Associated Press, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases testing when race may be used as a basis for assigning students to public schools. "The school policies in contention...are designed to keep schools from segregating along the same lines as neighborhoods," the AP reported. In Seattle, Washington, "only high school students are affected," while the Louisville, Kentucky "plan applies system-wide."
The Seattle Times pointed out that in attendance at the proceedings were the widow of Thurgood Marshall -- "the first African-American Supreme Court justice who, as a young lawyer, argued and won the landmark school-integration case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954," Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., "who co-authored a brief supporting the Seattle and Louisville, Ky., school districts' use of race in assigning students to schools," and John Heyburn II, the U.S. district judge "who ruled in the Louisville case, showed up to see what the court thought of his ruling."
In its brief to the court, the Seattle school district pointed out that "The plan has prevented the re-segregation that inevitably would result from the community's segregated housing patterns and that most likely would produce many schools that might be perceived as 'failing."'
The Bush administration is siding with "parents who are suing the school districts, much as it intervened on behalf of college and graduate students who challenged affirmative action policies before the Supreme Court in 2003," AP reported.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento, California-based anti-affirmative action legal organization is aiding the Seattle parents hoping to have that city's school integration plan scuttled, and is part of the team fighting Louisville's school district. The foundation submitted legal briefs to the Supreme Court supporting challenges to the integration plans.
Read the full report >
The 'Apparat' that won't go away
 Ever since a throng of ex-communist, socialist, and liberal power seekers swung hard right in the 1970s, the brainwashing of American public opinion has been one of the primary goals of so-called movement conservatism. The turncoat leftists, disillusioned by the festering of Democratic power under Nixon, became the founding cadres of the neoconservative action front. They brought with them a long tradition, stretching from the Kremlin to the Vatican, of captivating the masses with the art of inventive phrase-making, hot-button sloganeering, loaded words, and intemperate labels.
The word "propaganda" was adapted from the Vatican's department of "propagandum," the Office for the Propagation of the Faith, devoted to the swelling the ranks of its congregants. The government of Woodrow Wilson pioneered mass propaganda techniques in America during World War I. The Soviets embraced "agitprop," political agitation backed by propaganda to gain influence and power at home, as well as far beyond the Kremlin. The Nazi chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels, displayed the cynical viewpoint of effective propagandists in his diary: "The rank-and-file are usually much more primitive than we imagine." Controlling the language of political disputation to buttress his power agenda was central to Hitler's bid to rule the German people. "Propaganda," Goebbels wrote, "must...always be essentially simple and repetitious."
Here, in the manipulative hands of the neocons and their allies -- social, religious, and corporate conservatives, together with Republican politicians in Congress and the Reagan and Bush White House -- campaigns of linguistic distortion have been waged with shrewdness and unrelenting vigor. Until now, they have been immensely successful. Verbal distortions, flung out upon the airwaves, through the print media and the punditocracy, and in broadsides to members of Congress by the right-radical propaganda machine succeeded in diminishing respect for "liberalism" and converting "liberal" into a dirty word.
Read the full report >
On September 19, 2005, Jason Christy, the head of Christy Media and the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Church Report, a national news and business journal for pastors and Christian leaders, was named executive director of the Christian Coalition by the organization's president, Roberta Combs. "I am honored and humbled to be chosen by the Christian Coalition's Board of Directors for this key position," Christy said. "It is crucial at this time in our nation for people of faith to engage the culture, and to realize that at the grassroots level they can make a difference."
Less than a month later, Christy changed his mind, deciding not to take the position. According to Word News, Christy intimated that it would be difficult to work with the Christian Coalition and continue running his various businesses.
Less than a year later, the Coalition's board voted to name Joel Hunter president of the organization. Hunter was/is the senior pastor of the nondenominational Longwood, Florida-based Northland Church, also known as Northland A Church Distributed, and a founder of both the Christian Citizen and the Alliance for the Distributed Church. In late November, however, Hunter stepped down as president-elect (he was to have assumed office on January 1), saying that he had wanted the organization to focus on issues other than abortion and same-sex marriage (such as poverty and environmental protection), but Coalition leaders did not. "I think the board just got scared," said Hunter, the author of "Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won't Fly With Most Conservative Christians."
Read the full report >
Ethically-challenged head of Toward Tradition, one of the Christian Right's most reliable Jewish allies, decides to keep the doors of his organization open
A funny thing happened to Rabbi Daniel Lapin on his journey to constantly claiming the moral high ground: Toward Tradition, his conservative Jewish organization, got so deeply involved with the shenanigans of the now-jailed Republican Party mega-lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- Lapin's longtime friend and business associate -- that rumors of the organization's demise began to percolate in the media. But despite the rumor that Toward Tradition would shut its doors -- a rumor generated largely by the Rabbi's testimony before a congressional committee -- Lapin has now pledged to keep the organization's doors open.
Before deciding not to pull the plug on Toward Tradition -- which Lapin claims has 31,000 members, half Jewish and half Christian -- Lapin took a few minutes to cheap-shot Barbra Streisand, another old friend. In a column titled "Why The Streisand I Once Knew Was Never Obscene," Lapin scolded the singer for using foul language -- the f-word -- while combating a heckler during a concert in Madison Square Garden in early October.
Lapin claimed that Streisand's ill-mannered response must have been a result of her embrace of secular liberalism.
"As it turns out," the Jewish Daily Forward tersely noted, "Streisand could just as well have fired off her own statement, under the headline: 'The Rabbi I Once Knew Was Never Under Investigation by a Senate Committee.'"
Read the full report >
|
SEARCH RESEARCH
MT WRITERS
Andrew J. Weaver
Andrew J. Weaver &
Nicole Seibert
Andrew J. Weaver, et. al.
Bill Berkowitz
Bryan G. Pfeifer
Dave Johnson
David Domke
David Neiwert
David Rubenstein
Dennis Redovich
Eric Alterman
Jerry Landay
Mark & Louise Zwick
Max Blumenthal
Michael Winship
Phil Wilayto
Rob Levine
|
