“Tea Party Consulting Scam”: The Real Conservatives Funded By The Senate Conservatives Fund
It’s worth reading Politico’s Manu Raju and Maggie Haberman’s recent story on the Senate Conservative Fund, an independent political group that used to specialize in backing “insurgent” primary candidates over “establishment” ones, and that now devotes the bulk of its spending against actual incumbent Republican elected officials — including, most notably, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The SCF’s leader, Matt Hoskins, has a “core team of five staffers” and no board of directors to answer to. The organization reports that it raised more than $9 million in 2013. It spent some of that money on campaigning for its chosen candidates. It has spent some of that money on … other things.
But without a board of directors, Hoskins and his team can choose to spend with little accountability.
Such expenditures include purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of conservative commentator Mark Levin’s books to hand out to donors as a freebie for their contributions. His group also paid $143,360 over three years to a luxury design firm to renovate office space in Washington townhouses, according to campaign-finance filings.Between May 2010 and October 2013, Hoskins and his company, Bold Colors, have been paid, in total, $463,750, with an additional $72,000 from the SCF’s super PAC, records show.
To sum up: The SCF has paid more than a half-million dollars to the consulting firm run by the head of the SCF. But the detail that caused a minor conservative media shit storm was the detail about the SCF buying up Mark Levin’s book in bulk. A spokesperson for the RNC — the “establishment” — tweeted about it, which led to a bunch of true conservatives complaining about the dastardly accusation that Levin is somehow on the take, just because this group sent a bunch of money this way and he sends a bunch of donors their way. Levin said that the RNC spokesperson, who sent one tweet calling attention to the Politico story, “will not silence me with his sleazy inside-the-beltway tactics.”
And then Erick Erickson stepped up to defend Levin and the SCF, with a completely insane post comparing the symbiotic relationship between the SCF and Levin to the fact that a National Republican Senatorial Committee staffer had child pornography on his computer. I mean, yes, one is a “guilt-by-association” argument with no coherent financial motive while the other is a clear-cut conflict-of-interest deal, but still, they both happened. Erick Erickson: master of analogies. Erickson writes: “It is just as ridiculous to accuse Mark Levin and the Senate Conservatives Fund of a quid pro quo relationship when they happen to be allies in a fight and also happen to be friends.”
Even if we didn’t live in a world where explicit endorsements-for-pay were common among conservative radio personalities, it wouldn’t be “ridiculous” to assume that buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of a host’s book would lead to the host saying nice things about you. But the problem for Erickson’s argument is that we actually do live in a world where conservative groups pay talk radio hosts obscene amounts of money to boost their groups. And one of the hosts who does this is Mark Levin. It is a thing he does. He endorses groups for money.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, with the help of various talk radio people, made itself the most prominent group fighting against the GOP establishment on behalf of the Tea Party. That led to them raising lots and lots of money. That money goes to people running the SCF, in the form of salaries and consulting fees, and it goes to the people promoting the SCF, in the form of direct payments and mass book purchases. None of this is illegal (as far as I know, anyway). Is it immoral? Is it unethical? Not many people are interested in answering that question. Nearly every prominent national conservative is in on the graft, and the marks are people who write checks to fund the advancement of conservative ideas or the election of conservative politicians. All of this is exceedingly well-documented. And it doesn’t matter.
The thing about this grand bamboozling is that the marks want to be bamboozled. When you tell them that Glenn Beck is paid to have certain opinions, they truly do not care. Sending people money to fight for a cause you strongly believe in feels good. The apocalyptic pitches may be obviously manipulative to anyone outside the target demographic, but they obviously work. And for years, the scheme actually worked in the larger sense, of enriching people and advancing the conservative agenda. With the financial (if not political) success of the SCF’s nihilistic approach to strategy, conservatives invested in the actual policy agenda are starting to worry.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 14, 2014
“The More We See”: Trayvon Martin Or George Zimmerman, Who’s The Real Thug?
With George Zimmerman out on bail last week after his latest run-in with police, it seems an opportune time to discuss the second killing of Trayvon Martin.
The first, of course, has been discussed ad infinitum since Zimmerman shot the unarmed 17-year-old to death last year. But then Trayvon was killed again. The conservative noise machine engaged in a ritual execution of his character and worth, setting out with breathtaking indifference to facts and callous disregard for simple decency to murder the memory of a dead child.
Geraldo Rivera blamed him for his own death because he wore a hooded sweatshirt — in the rain, yet. Glenn Beck’s website suggested he might have been an arsonist, kidnapper or killer. Rush Limbaugh made jokes about “Trayvon Martin Luther King.”
Some conservative readers even chastised me for referring to him as a “child” or a “boy” though at 17, he was legally both. Makes him seem too sympathetic, they said. One man assured me, absent any evidence or, apparently, any need of it, that contrary to reports, Trayvon was not walking to where he was staying that day but was in fact “casing” the neighborhood.
One woman forwarded a chain email depicting a tough-looking, light-skinned African-American man with tattoos on his face. It was headlined: “The Real Trayvon Martin,” which it wasn’t. It was actually a then-32-year-old rapper who calls himself The Game. But the message was clear: Trayvon was a scary black man who deserved what he got.
I sent that woman an image of Trayvon from the Zimmerman trial. It shows him lying open-eyed and dead on the grass. “This is the real Trayvon,” I wrote.
It was a waste of time. “They’re both pictures of Trayvon,” she insisted. So deeply, bizarrely invested was she in the idea of Trayvon as thug that she could not distinguish between a fair-skinned man with tattoos, and a brown boy with no visible markings. Literally, they all look alike to her.
And once again, a conservative movement which argues with airy assurance that American racism died long ago, disproves its thesis with its actions.
Here, someone wants it pointed out that Trayvon Martin was not an angel. Well, he wasn’t. He took pictures flipping the bird. He used marijuana. He was suspended from school at the time of his shooting. Obviously, he needed guidance. The same is true of many boys. Indeed, it is rumored that there are even white children who use marijuana.
But here’s the thing: Why did some of us need Trayvon to be an angel in the first place? Why did they feel such a pressing urgency to magnify — and manufacture — his failings? Why was it so important to them to make him unworthy of sympathy?
It is a question that assumes new potency the more we see of George Zimmerman. On the day he shot Trayvon, this hero of the conservative noise machine, this righteous white Hispanic man who was, they say, just standing his ground, already had a record that included an accusation he attacked an undercover police officer. That same year — 2005 — a woman sought a restraining order against him, alleging domestic violence.
In September, Zimmerman had a fresh run-in with police over a domestic violence accusation by his estranged wife. In this latest episode, a girlfriend said he pulled a gun on her. In court, she said that once, he even tried to choke her.
Granted, none of these charges has been adjudicated, but there is certainly a pattern here. It ought to give decent people pause and the conservative noise machine shame — assuming it is capable of that emotion. That pattern paints in neon the machine’s willful blindness, the reflexive alacrity with which it assigns the thug label to the black kid — and innocence to the white man.
Well, look again. George Zimmerman seems awfully darn thuggish to me.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Featured Post, The National Memo, November 25, 2013
“Rotten To The Core”: The Race To Implement Or Kill Common Core Standards
I’ve argued off and on for a while that the steady and accelerating abandonment of standards-and-assessments-based education reform on the Right is one of the most under-reported stories of the year. And at the crucial point where states are on the brink of implementing the most ambitious “standards upgrade” initiative by far, the Common Core Standards endorsed by nearly all governors from both parties (see this Special Report from the May/June 2012 issue of the Washington Monthly for a thorough description), the withdrawal of conservative support is becoming an epidemic. The New York Times‘ Bill Keller has penned a useful op-ed on the subject:
[T]he Common Core was created with a broad, nonpartisan consensus of educators, convinced that after decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education, the country had to come together on a way to hold our public schools accountable. Come together it did — for a while.
The backlash began with a few of the usual right-wing suspects. Glenn Beck warned that under “this insidious menace to our children and to our families” students would be “indoctrinated with extreme leftist ideology….”
Beck’s soul mate Michelle Malkin warned that the Common Core was “about top-down control engineered through government-administered tests and left-wing textbook monopolies.” Before long, FreedomWorks — the love child of Koch brothers cash and Tea Party passion — and the American Principles Project, a religious-right lobby, had joined the cause. Opponents have mobilized Tea Partyers to barnstorm in state capitals and boiled this complex issue down to an obvious slogan, “ObamaCore!”….
In April the Republican National Committee surrendered to the fringe and urged states to renounce Common Core. The presidential aspirant Marco Rubio, trying to appease conservatives angry at his moderate stance on immigration, last month abandoned his support for the standards. And state by red state, the effort to disavow or defund is under way. Indiana has put the Common Core on hold. Michigan’s legislature cut off money for implementing the standards and is now contemplating pulling out altogether. Last month, Georgia withdrew from a 22-state consortium, one of two groups designing tests pegged to the new standards, ostensibly because of the costs. (The new tests are expected to cost about $29 per student; grading them is more labor-intensive because in addition to multiple-choice questions they include written essays and show-your-work math problems that will be graded by actual humans. “You’re talking about 30 bucks a kid, in an education system that now spends upwards of $9,000 or $10,000 per student per year,” said Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute.)
The Common Core is imperiled in Oklahoma, Utah, Alabama and Pennsylvania. All of the retreat, you will notice, has been in Republican-controlled states.
It’s hard to tell how much of the opposition is coming from conservatives who now oppose public education (or as an increasing number now call it, “government schools”) itself, or who think “national” standards will inhibit state-based or local efforts to undermine traditional public schools in favor of subsidies for private schools or home-schooling, but it’s clearly growing, and the heavy investment of the business community in Common Core is at best slowing down the revolt.
I strongly suspect opposition to Common Core will be a major theme for up-and-coming conservative state-level candidates in 2014, particularly for GOP primary challengers seeking to attract “base” activist support and/or to overcome suspicions of RINOism. In the race between Common Core implementation and efforts to stop it (and yes, there is opposition from the Left as well, and some concerns and misgivings across the spectrum, but nothing like what we are seeing on the Right), it’s currently a dead heat with the horse named “No!” gaining fast.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly POlitical Animal, August 19, 2013
“An Imaginary Dark Vision Of The Future”: Ted Cruz And His Manufactured Doctrine Of Pretend Paranoia
Texas Senator Ted Cruz has found a new and improved angle with which to push his war against marriage equality in America.
In an interview with Christian Broadcast Network’s David Brody, Cruz raised a full-scale red alert when announcing that gay marriage will put us on the road to placing our First Amendment protections at severe risk.
Seriously. He really said that.
“If you look at other nations that have gone down the road towards gay marriage, that’s the next step of where it gets enforced. It gets enforced against Christian pastors who decline to perform gay marriages, who speak out and preach biblical truths on marriage and that has been defined elsewhere as hate speech — as inconsistent with the enlightened view of government.”
Fearful that my own support of equal rights under the law for all Americans might lead to the loss of my constitutionally protected opportunity to be as offensive, prejudiced, bigoted and disrespectful in my own speech as humanly possible, I went looking for those ‘nations’ Cruz referred to—nations where same-sex marriage has led to the criminalization of free speech.
Fortunately, Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” was there to show me the way by relaying the sorry tale of Aake Green, a Pentecostal pastor in Sweden who was prosecuted under Swedish law for having some unkind things to say about gay marriage when addressing his congregation.
Writes The Blaze —
“Green’s plight corroborates the worries that Cruz has surrounding America’s current trajectory. In 2003, the preacher (referring to Green) likened homosexuality to cancer during one of his sermons. As a result, he was brought up on charges over these claims — statements that, in America, would currently be protected by the First Amendment… Mr. Green was convicted in June 2004 but allowed to remain free pending appeal.”
Never mind that Pastor Green was acquitted by Sweden’s Supreme Court as a result of a determination that Green’s speech was protected by the European Convention on Human Rights—the superseding law protecting Green’s right to say any ridiculous thing in public he likes. And given that the laws established by the European Convention take precedence over a Swedish law that was in conflict, the Swedish law under which the good pastor was prosecuted was rendered moot and unenforceable leading to no prosecutions of this nature in Sweden since this one, solitary 2005 case.
For that matter, I can find no evidence of any such prosecutions anywhere in the world, despite Cruz’s assertion that his paranoiac premonition is based on the examples of multiple nations.
While Senator Cruz was unwilling or unable to follow the Swedish case to its happy ending when forming his fears for a future without First Amendment rights in America as a direct result of gay marriage —happy endings don’t fit well into Cruz’s doctrine of pretend paranoia—one might have thought that this one-time Solicitor General for the State of Texas would have been able to research the law of his own nation before making his dire prediction.
In the famous 2011 Supreme Court case of Snyder v. Phelps, the free speech rights of the despicable Westboro Baptist Church—the church group famous for crashing funerals so that they may scream terrible things about gay people at grieving funeral attendees—were upheld by an 8-1 vote in the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, Chief Justice Roberts, while referring to the behavior of Westboro Church members as “vile”, stated—
“We cannot react to [Snyder’s] pain by punishing the speaker. As a nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
Could the Chief Justice’s statement possibly be more on point when it comes to contradicting Ted Cruz’s dark vision of a future with same-sex marriage?
And yet, Senator Ted Cruz, a man whose job was once to argue cases on behalf of his state before that very same United States Supreme Court, wants us to believe that he fears that gay marriage puts us at risk of forfeiting our right to free speech.
Nobody should be too terribly surprised as this is but the most recent expression of Cruz’s political formula guaranteed to send a warm thrill up the leg of right-wing extremists everywhere.
It is a formula as simple as it is winning.
You take a political issue that rattles the right-wing to its core, draw a line connecting the legalization of that issue to the possible loss of a constitutional right—no matter how ridiculous and far fetched the connection may be— and…presto…you’ve got one great political pitch sure to get the attention of those who thrive on the Doctrine of Pretend Paranoia.
This is not the first time Cruz has played this game.
Recall, if you will, that day on the Senate floor when Cruz’s suggestion that background checks before purchasing guns would place us on a path to a national registry for gun owners, despite the fact that the legislation under debate—the Manchin-Toomey Bill—specifically barred such a federal registry.
If you do not recall this, you might want to take a look at Cruz’s debate with Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as Schumer highlights the preposterous nature of Cruz’s paranoiac visions of the future.
Just like his efforts to connect same-sex marriage with the destruction of First Amendment rights, in the instance of gun control, Cruz took a piece of legislation that deeply upset his base, despite being popular with the overwhelming majority of Americans, and drew a line to an imaginary consequence.
What happened?
Cruz’s base ate it up and the legislation went down to defeat.
Mr. Cruz’s latest effort to scare the crap out of his right-wing following—no matter how ridiculous the perceived end result of a policy with which Cruz followers disagree with may be—is simply a refinement of the time-honored and highly effective GOP practice of using fear and loathing to inspire votes. All one need do is look at the success of a “death panel” pitch that did so much to skew public opinion against the Affordable Care Act and the effectiveness of this approach is crystal clear.
Of course there was no rational connection between the actual healthcare reform law and the paranoiac prospect of government death panels, but that really did not matter, did it?
Just as Cruz ignored the realities of the Manchin-Toomey background check legislation which specifically barred the national gun registry Cruz claimed to fear, Senator Cruz knew his delusional argument would appeal to the paranoia of his followers; and just as the 2011 Supreme Court case would make Cruz’s paranoid vision of gay marriage leading to the destruction of First Amendment rights nothing short of preposterous, Senator Cruz knows full well that creating fear and loathing, in his own unique style, makes for a reliable game plan as he begins his drive towards the White House.
Let’s hope that, in the final analysis, American voters will see through Ted Cruz’s fully manufactured and dark vision of America—or at least the pretend vision that the Senator wishes to sell us. There are enough ‘real life’ things in this world to be paranoid about without purposely supporting a candidate dedicated to purveying his pretend brand of paranoia in the hopes of frightening Americans into going down dark roads that don’t actually exist.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, July 24, 2013
“A Signature Brand Of Hate”: Trayvon Martin And Why The Right-Wing Media Spent 16 Months Smearing A Dead Teenager
Appearing on Fox & Friends in the wake of a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, Geraldo Rivera’s claim that Martin brought about his own death by dressing in a hooded sweatshirt the night of the killing was shocking, but not surprising. Echoing earlier comments he made on the program, Rivera proclaimed: “You dress like a thug, people are going to treat you like a thug.”
It was shocking because the idea of a well-paid commentator going on television and blaming an unarmed teen for being shot while walking home inside a gated community because he wore a hoodie — because he tried to look like “a thug” as Rivera put it — is repellent.
So yes, Rivera’s comments were shockingly awful and irresponsible. As was his claim that the all-female jury “would have shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did.” But his comments weren’t surprising, because Fox News and too much of the right-wing media have spent the last 16 months zeroing in on the memory of a dead teenager and doing their best to denigrate it.
Apart from the far right’s gleeful and disrespectful response to the not guilty verdict, there remains a separate thread of loud tastelessness that dates back to 2012 and focuses on the victim for all the wrong reasons, suggesting he somehow got what he deserved. (Or what he “sought.”)
Remember the fake, menacing photo of Martin that right-wing sites passed around last year? And when The Daily Caller published tweets from the slain boy’s closed Twitter account? Tweets that conservatives then used to portray the teen as a thug?
This week, Fox favorite Ten Nugent practically danced on Martin’s grave, accusing the dead teenager of being a “dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe” who was “responsible” for being shot by a volunteer neighborhood watchman on the night of February 26, 2012.
Comments by Rivera, Nugent and others were proof that a smear campaign was in full swing this week and a reminder the attacks are a continuation of the foul smears first unleashed in the wake of the killing. At the time, the attacks were an ugly attempt to justify Martin’s death, to shift the blame away from the gunman, Zimmerman, and to cloud the debate about Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law. (Rivera in 2012: “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”)
Trayvon Martin deserves better. Indeed, every victim, and particularly every victim of gun violence in America, deserves better than to have a well-funded media machine like the one led by Fox News targeting shooting victims for endless attacks on their character and on the choices, large and small, they made while alive.
There’s something spectacularly misguided about wanting to turn an unarmed shooting victim, an unarmed minor, into the bad guy and blame him for walking home with Skittles and an iced tea. But that’s what conservatives in the press have been doing, on and off, for nearly a year and a half now.
Recall the Slate headline from March, 2012, highlighting the trend: “When in Doubt, Smear the Dead Kid.”
Yet one of the puzzling questions surrounding the public saga of Martin’s death has always been why the partisan, conservative political movement in America, led by its powerful media outlets, felt the need to become so deeply invested in the case, and felt so strongly about defending the shooter, as well as demeaning the victim.
I understand why civil rights leaders who traditionally lean to the left politically embraced the case, why they saw it as part of a long history of injustice for blacks, and why they urged that Zimmerman be charged with a crime. But why did GOP bloggers, pundits and talk show hosts eventually go all in with their signature brand of hate for a local crime story?
As Kevin Drum wrote at Mother Jones last year:
There’s no special conservative principle at stake that says neighborhood watch captains should be able to shoot anyone who looks suspicious. There’s no special conservative principle at stake that says local police forces should barely even pretend to investigate the circumstances of a shooting. There’s no special conservative principle at stake that says young black men shouldn’t wear hoodies.
And if you go back and look at the coverage of the Martin story as it began to unfold nationally in the winter of 2012, the conservative media, including Fox News, were especially slow to take interest in the matter. That’s in part, I suspect, because there was no natural angle to pursue. As Orlando Sentinel columnist Beth Kassab wrote at the time, there was “no good way for gun proponents to spin the death of an unarmed teenager.” The Martin killing didn’t fit the far right’s usual narrative about violence and minorities and how white America is allegedly under physical assault from Obama’s violent African-American base.
At the time, National Review editor Rich Lowry even wrote a blog post headlined “Al Sharpton is right,” agreeing that Zimmerman should be charged with the killing of Martin. (Lowry slammed the shooter’s “stupendous errors in judgment” that fateful night.)
That same day, on March 23, President Obama answered a direct question about the controversy and said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” That quickly sparked a mindless right-wing media stampede as Obama Derangement Syndrome kicked in. “Once Obama spoke out, caring about Martin became a ‘Democratic’ issue, and Republicans felt not just free but obligated to fling all sorts of shit,” Alex Pareene wrote last year at Salon.
Pledging to uncover the “truth” about the shooting victim and determined to prove definitively that anti-black racism doesn’t exists in America (it’s a political tool used by liberals, Republican press allies insist), many in the right-wing media have dropped any pretense of mourning Martin’s death and set out to show how he probably deserved it.
Along with the fake photo of Martin being passed around online, chatter about his alleged drug-dealing past, and his teenage Tweets being dissected, bloggers also pushed the phony claim that a photo of Martin used by the news media had been lightened to make him look more “innocent.” (The charge was bogus.)
Then Glenn Beck’s The Blaze published a laundry list of criminal offenses Martin may have committed while he was alive:
• Aggravated assault
• Aggravated battery against a non-staff member
• Armed robbery
• Arson
• Assault/Threat against M-DCPS employees or persons conducting official business
• Battery or Aggravated battery against M-DCPS employees or persons conducting official business*
• Homicide
• Kidnapping/Abduction
• Making a false report/threat against the school*
• Sexual battery
• Possession, use, sale, or distribution of firearms, explosives, destructive devices, and other weapons.
It was a textbook example of trying to blame the victim. And it’s the miserable course Rivera, Nugent and others continued this week.
By: Eric Boehlert, The Huffington Post Blog, July 17, 2013
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