“From Backyard Barbeque To Food Fight”: CPAC, The Right-Wing Woodstock Or A Bad Family Reunion?
Like at a family reunion, the infighting at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) started long before anybody arrived.
First, the group American Atheists announced that it would be sponsoring a booth at the conference, with the goal of bringing conservative nonbelievers “out of the closet.” The religious right was not pleased.
“CPAC’s mission is to be an umbrella for conservative organizations that advance liberty, traditional values and our national defense,” said the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. But he made clear that atheists would certainly not fit under his umbrella: “Does the American Conservative Union really think the liberties and values they seek to preserve can be maintained when they partner with individuals and organizations that are undermining the understanding that our liberties come from God?” he asked. Good question.
So, the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, gave the atheist group the boot. In response, the atheists showed up anyway to debate attendees in the hallway.
Then there was the perennial problem of the gays. In 2011, religious right groups including the FRC boycotted CPAC after the ACU allowed the conservative LGBT group GOProud to cosponsor the event. Once again, the establishment sided with the religious right and for the next two years banned GOProud from participating. This year, ACU offered a “compromise” in which GOProud was allowed to attend the event but not to so much as sponsor a booth in the exhibition hall. The “compromise” was so insulting that one of GOProud’s founders quit the organization’s board in protest.
But what about the people who were too embarrassingly far-right for CPAC? Not to worry, there’s no such thing.
Although the atheist and LGBT groups were too far off-message for the ACU, it did allow the anti-immigrant group ProEnglish to sponsor a booth at CPAC. Just a quick Google would have told the conference organizers that ProEnglish is run by a zealous white nationalist, Bob Vandervoort. In fact, CPAC’s organizers might have recognized Vandervoort’s name from the uproar his inclusion in the event caused in 2012 and 2013.
Now, just because the ACU was ready to welcome anti-immigrant extremists doesn’t mean that that was enough for immigrant bashers. A group of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim activists who were worried that CPAC was going too soft on their issues organized an alternative conference across the street. One of their concerns was the perennial conspiracy theory that ACU member Grover Norquist is a secret Muslim Brotherhood agent. Another is that CPAC dared to hold a panel featuring immigration reform proponents.
They shouldn’t have worried. Three days of speeches on the CPAC main stage made clear that many prominent conservative activists have no intention of moderating their stance on immigration reform. Donald Trump told the audience that immigrants are “taking your jobs,” Rep. Michele Bachmann said she wouldn’t even consider immigration reform until they “build the danged fence,” and Ann Coulter, never one to disappoint, suggested that if immigration reform passes “we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America.” Then, there was One America News anchor Graham Ledger, who used the CPAC podium to claim that because of immigration, schools no longer teach “the American culture.”
To be fair, CPAC did make some efforts at opening the Republican umbrella, hosting a panel on minority outreach off the main stage. But the gesture would have been slightly more meaningful if anybody had bothered to show up.
Any family has its squabbles. But this awkward backyard barbeque has turned into a full-fledged food fight.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For The American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, March 11, 2014
“Another Embarrassing Pothole”: How Ugly Racial Ideology Mars CPAC, Year After Year After Year
Efforts at “rebranding” the American right have plunged into still another highly embarrassing pothole at the most anticipated conservative event of the year. Almost as soon as the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) kicked off just outside Washington, D.C., the event became mired in a controversy over white nationalism.
ProEnglish, the white nationalist-led English-only outfit that created serious headaches for the conference back in 2012, has been quietly allowed to return as an official exhibitor at CPAC 2014, which opened on Thursday.
According to the CPAC 2014 website, the ProEnglish booth is number 538, sandwiched between the booth for a movie about the IRS “scandal” and one occupied by Tradition, Family, Property, a right-wing Catholic organization.
The site lists the ProEnglish contact for CPAC as Robert Vandervoort.
Prior to becoming executive director of ProEnglish, Vandervoort was the organizer of the white nationalist group Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance, while he lived in Illinois. During that period Vandervoort was at the center of much of the white nationalist activity in the region.
While Vandervoort was in charge, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance often held joint meetings with the local chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens. He also made appearances at white nationalist events outside Illinois, for instance participating in the 2009 Preserving Western Civilization Conference.
Vandervoort was hired by the Tanton-founded English-Only group ProEnglish during the autumn of 2011, after the organization lost three other executive directors in less than a year. Shortly after Vandervoort took the job, ProEnglish hired Phil Tignino as the group’s webmaster and social media coordinator. Tignino was the former head of the Washington State University chapter of the white nationalist college group Youth for Western Civilization.
The Vandervoort problem shouldn’t be new to CPAC staff. After the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights raised concerns over Vandervoort’s white nationalist attachments during CPAC 2012, a significant discussion ensued. The Kansas City Star, the Wichita Eagle and Mother Jones were among the publications to take note of these events. American Spectator, a decidedly conservative periodical, weighed in with the comment that “if Vandervoort indeed organized events for an American Renaissance affiliate … he should explicitly and publicly renounce his old associates; that is a crowd that no one should touch with a 10-foot pole.”
Instead of taking that advice, Vandervoort tried to bamboozle the public by claiming, “I have never been a member of any group that has advocated hate or violence.” No one has accused Vandervoort of advocating violence. But the record clearly shows that he not only acted on behalf of American Renaissance, but that he shared its white nationalist views. Which, as American Spectator aptly noted, should not be touched with a 10-foot pole by CPAC, or anyone else.
White nationalism has become a recurring problem for CPAC. On the eve of last year’s conference, the group responsible for organizing CPAC chose to feature the work of a controversial white nationalist professor on its website. The American Conservative Union (ACU) website featured an article by Dr. Robert Weissberg, a retired University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign political science professor with a second career as a white nationalist. Like Vandervoort, Weissberg has been active with the white nationalist group American Renaissance. Inside the hall last year, CPAC’s problem with white nationalism flared at a Tea Party Patriots workshop entitled, “Trump the Race Card.” White nationalists turned the workshop into a pro-segregation apologia for slavery. There was a speaker who had previously advocated the execution of gays and lesbians. There were birther bigots and Islamophobes.
In 2012, white nationalists had officially broken down the gates to CPAC. That year, the conference featured Vandervoort on stage — twice. He was on a panel with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and he also moderated a panel entitled “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity is Weakening the American Identity.” The other speakers on that panel included Peter Brimelow, editor of the white nationalist website VDARE; Serge Trifkovic, an Islamophobic Serbian expatriate who before becoming the foreign affairs editor at the paleo-conservative magazine Chronicles was a spokesman for the convicted war criminal Biljana Plavsic; ProEnglish board chair Rosalie Porter; and John Derbyshire, once a contributing editor at National Review (until his racism got him fired), who now works with Brimelow at VDARE.
The organizers of CPAC don’t seem to have trouble changing their minds regarding to whom they sell exhibit space. On February 25, after an uproar, CPAC organizers reversed their decision and decided to not allow American Atheists to have an exhibition booth at this year’s event. Will CPAC do the same for a group run by a white nationalist?
By: David Burghart, The National Memo, March 6, 2014
“Scott Walker’s Little-Known Scandal”: When He Treated Welfare Recipients Like Dogs
Among the racist jokes and emails found in recently released documents connected to the criminal probe of Gov. Scott Walker’s 2010 campaign, one stood out: A “joke” about a woman trying to sign up her dogs for welfare, because “my Dogs are mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddys are. They expect me to feed them, provide them with housing and medical care, and feel guilty.” The punch line: “My Dogs get their first checks Friday.”
Walker’s deputy chief of staff Kelly Rindfleisch replied: “That is hilarious. And so true.”
The joke is bad enough on its own, but it’s also worth noting: Back when Walker was Milwaukee county executive, and Rindfleisch was a top aide, he managed the county’s welfare programs so abysmally that after lawsuits by local clients, the state was forced to take them over. “They didn’t just call people dogs, they treated them like dogs,” one Milwaukee elected official recalled angrily.
“Milwaukee County has demonstrated a sustained inability to successfully provide services to its (poor) customers,” state health services director Karen Timberlake wrote in a February 2009 letter to Walker announcing the state takeover. Milwaukee became only one of 72 Wisconsin counties to wind up with its programs for poor people under state control.
It’s a chapter in Walker’s career that shows why, to many in Milwaukee, his staff’s racist jokes aren’t funny.
At the height of the recession, in 2008 and 2009, requests for aid in Wisconsin, and throughout the country, soared. But in Milwaukee, where 41 percent of African-Americans live below the poverty line, people had trouble getting help. Roughly 95 percent of calls to the county’s client-intake call center went unanswered in 2008, a state probe later found.
The social services department budget funded 25 positions at the intake center, but a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter found only seven staffers working among empty cubicles when he visited. Advocates and the county workers’ union complained, but Walker stonewalled. Aided by the outcry, Walker began arguing for privatizing the social services intake unit. “He was managing it to fail,” charges AFSCME contract administrator Dave Eisner.
In June 2008, Legal Action of Wisconsin sued on behalf of thousands of needy people who couldn’t get benefits even though they qualified, because they couldn’t get their eligibility verified.
“Milwaukee County has reached a low point in its [welfare] delivery service,” Legal Action lawyer Pat DeLessio wrote in a letter to the County Board. “It is almost impossible to get through to anyone on the phone” to apply for or verify benefits.
But the problems weren’t just at the call center. In 2008, one out of five food stamp recipients dropped for ineligibility were in fact eligible, and wrongly cut from the program. In 2007, 60 percent of county decisions to cut food or other aid were overturned on appeal within two months. Roughly 30 percent of needy applicants were waiting more than two weeks for aid. Two-thirds of all complaints received by state welfare agencies involved Milwaukee County residents having problems obtaining Medicaid, food aid and child care services. And while the state paid a higher share of Milwaukee’s income-maintenance program costs than in other counties, Walker complained that state funding was inadequate.
With the call center problems and need rising, clients took to lining up at county offices for services before they even opened, DeLessio recalled, because by midday workers would declare the building was full, and turn away new applicants. In June 2008 at least 3,000 people showed up before dawn seeking food vouchers in what was later called a “food riot.”
“The food crisis in Milwaukee and throughout the United States is worse than many of us have realized,” said Milwaukee Common Council president Willie Hines. “We expect long lines for free food in third-world countries.”
Walker’s answer was to privatize the intake unit and other services. His proposed September 2008 budget featured his privatization proposals, but the county board blocked him. “It was clearly a game – he didn’t give a damn about poor people,” Eisner charges.
State officials repeatedly complained about the service inadequacies, and eventually threatened to take the programs away from the county. Politics clearly played a role in the conflict; in 2006 Walker had planned to run for governor against incumbent Democrat Jim Doyle, but soon dropped out of the Republican primary. “I believe that it was God’s will for me to run,” Walker said at the time. “After a great deal of prayer during the last week, it is clear that it is God’s will for me to step out of the race.” It was an open secret that Walker was planning another run for governor in 2010, and if his skirmishes with the Doyle administration hurt Milwaukee’s poor, they helped its county executive with the state’s conservative GOP primary voters.
After a series of tense meetings between county and state administrators, when it was clear the state was going to take over the anti-poverty programs, Walker made a brazen move. He wrote to state social services director Karen Timberlake and invited the state to take over the county’s income maintenance program.
“This is a state mandate,” Walker wrote, in a letter he immediately released to the media. “It’s amazing state government has been such a lousy partner on this.”
County board chair Lee Holloway told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that Walker invited the state in, over his and the board-majority’s objection, to preempt the state’s embarrassing announcement that it was taking over Milwaukee’s programs. “Holloway said he thought Walker’s letter was meant to upstage state officials ‘before they make a move on him,’” the paper reported.
“The county board didn’t want the takeover,” recalls Legal Action’s Pat DeLessio. “There’s a strong system of county control in Wisconsin. But Walker just gave up.”
No one was fooled by Walker’s letter. A day after he released it, the state announced its takeover. In her letter to Walker explaining the move, Timberlake wrote that Wisconsin state government “has in fact expended millions of additional dollars and thousands of hours of staff resources to assist your county over a period of years. Despite these efforts, Milwaukee County’s performance fails national and state standards and is failing the people of the county.” Yet two years after the state took over his social service programs, Walker took over the state as governor.
Kelly Rindfleisch, who found the joke about welfare-receiving dogs “hilarious” and “so true,” was Walker’s deputy chief of staff while he was mismanaging the county’s welfare programs. Her boss, chief of staff Tom Nardelli, himself circulated a racist joke about the “nightmare” of waking up black, gay, disabled and HIV-positive while working for Milwaukee County. Against the backdrop of the way Walker treated welfare recipients, their joking is even less funny.
Rindfleisch was eventually convicted of illegal campaign activity on public time, a felony conviction that she is appealing. She and Nardelli paid no penalty for enjoying racist jokes on public time.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 3, 2014
“My Brother’s Keeper”: A Helping Hand For Young Men Of Color
“My Brother’s Keeper” has a much nicer ring than “stop and frisk.” It also promises to be a more effective, less self-defeating way to address the interlocking social and economic crises afflicting young men of color.
I’ll go out on a limb and predict that President Obama gets some heat for launching a program whose benefits are aimed solely at African American and Hispanic men and boys. The nation’s first black president gets slammed by critics who accuse him of “playing the race card” every time he acknowledges that race and racism still play a role in determining opportunities and outcomes.
But obviously they do. My Brother’s Keeper, which Obama announced Thursday, is the kind of targeted public-private initiative that might actually do some good, even without tons of new federal money thrown in.
I suppose other critics might ask what took Obama so long. The president bristles at this line of questioning, pointing to the fact that his most ambitious achievements — including the Affordable Care Act — have their greatest impact among disadvantaged minorities.
Obama also understands that even if he had a Congress that would give him carte blanche, solving the problems that face young men of color would take many years of sustained effort.
You’d have to fix broken schools and broken families. You’d have to eliminate the racial bias in policing and the justice system that makes African American and Hispanic men far more likely to be stopped, arrested and sent to prison than whites who engage in similar illegal behavior. You’d have to somehow bring enough commerce and industry back into hollowed-out neighborhoods to provide decent jobs. You’d have to convince millions of young men that the odds are not stacked against them, despite copious evidence to the contrary.
Where do you even start? Down in the trenches.
“We have credibility on these issues because we’ve been working on the ground,” La June Montgomery Tabron, president and chief executive of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, told me over lunch this week.
Kellogg is one of 10 major foundations that have agreed to join business leaders and the federal government in the Brother’s Keeper initiative. Collectively, the foundations are already spending more than $150 million on programs aimed at young men of color. They are now pledging to invest at least an additional $200 million, coordinating their efforts to channel the funds toward approaches that deliver measurable results.
The other participating foundations deserve a shout-out: the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the California Endowment, the Ford Foundation, the John R. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Kapor Center for Social Impact, the Open Society Foundations, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Bloomberg Philanthropies. Thanks and kudos to all.
As the foundations identify factors that either create or destroy opportunity for young men of color, Obama has pledged to adjust federal policy accordingly. One example is the disparity in school suspensions. The Education Department recently issued new guidelines for enforcing “zero tolerance” school disciplinary policies after studies found that minorities were more likely than whites to be suspended for infractions. Students who miss class time due to suspensions are less likely to graduate. And in the case of far too many young men of color, during the suspensions — when they’re not in the relative sanctuary of school — they are more likely to find themselves in potentially dangerous situations.
As Montgomery Tabron reminded me, Trayvon Martin’s home was in Miami, far from the central Florida town where he died. At the time of his fatal encounter with George Zimmerman, Martin was staying with his father for a few days because he had been suspended from school. Authorities had found what they said was marijuana residue in his backpack.
No one is arguing that young men of color are all angels. Obama has consistently preached the need for at-risk youths to take personal responsibility for their lives. Some commentators have criticized the president — unfairly, he feels — for “blaming the victims” rather than the societal forces that work against them.
But the reality is that if you’re male and African American or Hispanic, you can’t afford to make the same youthful mistakes that your white counterparts get to make. For example, blacks and whites are equally likely to smoke weed, according to surveys. But blacks are four times more likely to be arrested and jailed on marijuana charges.
That’s one of the many reasons why this race-specific initiative is so badly needed. My Brother’s Keeper isn’t a solution. But it’s a start.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 27, 2014
“The GOP’s Ted Nugent Problem”: Torn Between Expanding Its Base And Appealing To Loyalists
The Republican Party in the era of the Tea Party and the “autopsy” can’t make up its mind. Torn between expanding its base so that it can survive in the long term and appeasing its loyalists so it can survive in the short term, the party doesn’t know where to go. The choice boils down to winning a few more seats in November and writing off the future of the party. Oddly, November seems to be winning every time.
For Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott the choice seems easy. He chose Ted Nugent, the physical embodiment of the off-the-rails toxicity that Republicans just don’t know how to quit. Abbott certainly had to know the stir he’d cause when he invited Nugent to join him on the campaign trail last week.
Ted Nugent is not just a former rocker who happens to be a Republican. Nugent’s infamous “subhuman mongrel” slur is just a representative sample of the bile he produces on a regular basis. He has threatened the president, saying, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun,” told an audience to “keep a fucking gun in your hand, boys” in response to the Obama administration, implied the president is like a coyote who needs to be shot, and said before the 2012 election that if the “vile, evil America-hating” Obama were to be reelected, Nugent would be “either dead or in jail by this time next year.”(For the record, Nugent is still very much alive and free to make statements like the above.)
Why listen to Nugent (as People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch does more often than they would probably like)? Because he doesn’t just shout his rants from the stage at his concerts. He shares the stage with people like Greg Abbott.
In a time when many Republicans are trying to moderate the rhetoric they use to explain their extreme policies, Greg Abbott is just the latest who apparently has no such concerns. He ‘s more than happy to provide a platform for Nugent, an unabashedly violent, and unapologetic racist spokesperson who exults in attacking the president- – when the president is Barack Obama, that is.
Nugent has speculated whether “it would have been best had the South won the Civil War”; suggested banning people who owe no federal income tax from voting; lashed out at “those well-fed motherfucker food stamp cocksuckers”; and blamed Trayvon Martin’s death on the “mindless tendency to violence we see in black communities across America.”
In other words, Nugent’s not the sort of person any reasonable candidate would invite along on the campaign trail. But reason is not the way to prove one’s bona fides to a large share of the Tea Party that has taken over the Grand Old Party. When Nugent said in a campaign appearance that “we don’t have to question Greg Abbott’s courage, because he invited me here today,” he was reassuring the base that “autopsy reports” aside, the GOP has no intention of changing.
And that’s the problem. Ted Nugent isn’t a Greg Abbott gaffe. His presence on the Abbott campaign trail represents a deliberate effort to cultivate the most extreme elements of the Republican base. The party can moderate its positions to attract more voters. Or it can stick with extremism to keep a core of the voters it has. But it can’t have it both ways.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People for The American Way ; The Huffington Post Blog, February 27, 2014
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