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Unions Gearing Up to Spend Major
Chunk of Members' Dues on Election
Associated Press
Unions are gearing up to spend more than $400 million to help re-elect Pres. Obama and lift Democrats this election year in a fight for labor's survival. Fearing the consequences of a Republican in the White House -- union leaders say they have little choice as they try to beat back GOP efforts to curb collective bargaining rights or limit their ability to collect dues. "People are digging deeper," said Larry Scanlon, political director of the country's largest public workers union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "If Republicans take over the presidency, Congress and enough state legislatures, unions will be out of business, pure and simple." AFSCME, the biggest overall spender in the 2010 midterm elections, is expected to spend at least $100 million or more this election.
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Obama’s FCC Used Regulatory
Muscle to Destroy LightSquared
The Daily Caller
Pres. Obama’s Federal Communications Commission demolished wireless broadband company LightSquared’s competition through a pattern of regulatory decisions apparently aimed at establishing an “open-access” Internet in the United States. The FCC successfully green-lighted LightSquared’s corporate formation in 2009 by allowing Wall Street hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners to purchase majority ownership in satellite company SkyTerra. A major obstacle that still remained in LightSquared’s way was competitor GlobalStar. GlobalStar had a similar operation to the one LightSquared was building at the time. A major difference, though, was GlobalStar’s already-orbiting satellites, and the broadband Internet access it was already providing to Americans in rural areas of the country.
Michelle Obama Courts Women
by Touting Birth Control Rule
Bloomberg
Michelle Obama is being billed as the featured attraction in house parties her husband’s re-election campaign is organizing around the country to try to boost his support among women voters. The women’s house parties come as Michelle Obama is taking a more visible role in her husband’s re-election campaign. She spoke at Democrat Party fundraisers in Los Angeles on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, while in California for appearances on “The Tonight Show” and Ellen DeGeneres’ show to promote her anti-obesity program. The house parties also follow the Obama administration’s rule to provide women who work for religious hospitals and universities access to free contraception through their health insurance. The re-election campaign counts access to contraception without a co-pay among the administration’s accomplishments for women.
Big Money Foundations Coordinate
Campaign Against Keystone Pipeline
The Daily Caller
A Powerpoint presentation shows that during a July 2008 meeting, the $789 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund proposed to coordinate and fund a dozen environmental and anti-corporate activist groups’ efforts to scuttle pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Canada to the United States. The most recent incarnation of that pipeline plan, the Keystone XL project, was the subject of intense public controversy until the Obama administration rejected it in January. The 2008 meeting consisted of presentations from Rockefeller Brothers Fund program officer Michael Northrop, Corporate Ethics International Executive Director Michael Marx, Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Susan Casey-Lefkowitz and the director of a Canadian activist group called the Pembina Institute.
Occupy Movement Gets a PAC
CBS News
The Occupy movement has decided to fight fire with fire. Last week, John Paul Thornton of Decatur, AL, filed to create a PAC for the Occupy Movement. “PAC” is an acronym for a political action committee, or an organization that campaigns for or against candidates, legislation, and ballot initiatives. Thornton is an active member in the Alabama Occupy movement. He said he came up with the idea when he was laying in bed. “[I was] watching [The Colbert Report] and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t be nice if Occupy had a PAC,’ and...like a lightbulb, it came to me!” he told CBS Atlanta. The money that will be raised can be used by Occupy as a whole, from branches in Huntsville, AL, to ones in New York City or Oakland, CA. Thornton said, “This is going to be uber-transparent down to the cent. It will be egalitarian and democratic.”
Left-Wing, Progressive Foundations
Lavish Millions on Media Matters
The Daily Caller
Relying on tax returns and websites of wealthy US foundations, a Daily Caller investigation has revealed the sources of more than $28.8 million in funding collected by the Progressive Media Matters for America since 2003, the year before its formal incorporation. That sum represents 54% of every dollar the organization has raised in its history, making Media Matters a principally foundation-driven -- not citizen-supported -- activist group. The list of Media Matters’ foundation funders, 120 in all, reads like a Who’s Who of the American progressive movement, including the far-left Tides Foundation ($4.3M), George Soros’ Open Society Institutes ($1.07M), the Ford Foundation ($966K), the Sandler Foundation ($400K) -- endowed by subprime mortgage lenders Herb and Marion Sandler and the Schumann Fund for Media & Democracy ($600K).
Congress to Scrutinize
Media Matters Tax-Exempt Status
The Daily Caller
Congressional Republicans are now interested in examining Media Matters' tax-exempt status. Doing so would cause the GOP to wade into the complex world of tax laws that govern “exempt organizations” such as Media Matters and more than 1 million other charitable organizations that are exempt from federal income tax. Media Matters’ critics have questioned its tax-exempt status for some time. The IRS has a series of requirements that must be met before organizations can qualify. Successful applicants pay no federal income tax because the government presumes such charities perform services benefitial to the public. Donors may deduct their charitable contributions. One central requirement forbids attempts to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities or advocating for or against political candidates.
Feds Shut Down Amish Farm for Selling Fresh Milk
The Washington Times
The FDA won its two-year fight to shut down an Amish farmer who was selling fresh raw milk to eager consumers in the Washington, DC, region after a judge this month banned Daniel Allgyer from selling his milk across state lines and he told his customers he would shut down his farm altogether. The decision has enraged Mr. Allgyer’s supporters, some of whom have been buying from him for six years and say the government is interfering with their parental rights to feed their children. But the Food & Drug Administration, which launched a full investigation complete with a 5am surprise inspection and a straw-purchase sting operation against Mr. Allgyer’s Rainbow Acres Farm, said unpasteurized milk is unsafe and it was exercising its due authority to stop sales of the milk from one state to another.
Media Matters Memo 'Outs' Efforts
to Smear FOX News, Employees
The Daily Caller
A little after 1pm on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “FOX Fund” whose mission would be to attack the FOX News Channel. “Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone...Filling the lack of leadership on the right, FOX News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.” “We must take FOX News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network.” What Frisch proceeded to suggest, however, went well beyond what legitimate presidential campaigns attempt.
UN Chief, Aides Plot 'Green Economy'
Agenda at Upcoming Rio Summit
FOX News
At a closed-door retreat in a Long Island mansion late last October, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his topmost aides brainstormed about how the global organization could benefit from a "unique opportunity" to reshape the world, starting with the Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development, which takes place in Brazil in June. According to confidential minutes of the meeting, the 29-member group, known as the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination, discussed bold ambitions that stretch for years beyond the Rio conclave to consolidate a radical new global green economy, promote a spectrum of sweeping new social policies and build an even more important role for UN institutions “ to manage the process of globalization better.”
Obamacare Architect: Expect Steep
Increase in Healthcare Premiums
The Daily Caller
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who also devised former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s statewide healthcare reforms, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House in support of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informing officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under the reforms. In an email to The Daily Caller, Gruber framed this new reality in terms of the same human self-interest that some conservatives had warned in 2010 would ultimately rule the marketplace. “The market was so discriminatory,” Gruber told TheDC, “that only the healthy bought non-group insurance and the sick just stayed [uninsured]...It is true that even after tax credits some individuals are ‘losers,’” he conceded, “in that they pay more than before [Obama's] reform.”
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