$12.8 million to the Hudson Institute (Luntz is Adjunct Fellow)
$12.4 million to the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (David Horowitz)

Media Matters
May 25, 2004

GOP pollster Frank Luntz "Adjunct Fellow" at Hudson Institute

[EXCERPT]

Republican pollster Frank Luntz, CEO and president of Luntz Research Companies, appeared as a guest on the May 21 FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes to present the results of his new poll that purportedly showed that a plurality of Democrats say if they had the choice they would prefer Senator Hillary Clinton over Senator John Kerry as their presidential nominee. Luntz admitted radio host Rush Limbaugh had a role in instigating the survey...

As Salon has reported, there is little reason to trust a poll taken by Frank Luntz, who was reprimanded in 1997 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research... for his work polling for the Republican Party's 1994 'Contract with America' campaign platform...according to David W. Moore, author of the book The Super Pollsters, Luntz's work is little more than "propaganda" disguised as research...He is currently an "adjunct fellow" at the conservative Hudson Institute, and has conducted polls [for] ...David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture...

$32 million to the American Enterprise Institute, home of James Glassman

More on James Glassman as 'Journo-Lobbyist'

St Louis Post / Dispatch
Editor's note
May 20, 2004

Digging deeper into criticism of "Super Size Me"

The centerpiece of Tuesday's commentary page [of the St. Louis Post Dispatch] was "You are how you eat," a lively opinion piece criticizing the new documentary "Super Size Me," which premiered in St. Louis movie theaters last Friday. The author was James K. Glassman...

...Glassman used information from dietary specialists and data from McDonald's to ridicule [the documentary]...we did not know ...that McDonald's is one of the "sponsoring corporations" of [Glassman's] TechCentralStation.com...

...Glassman's reputation [???], the timeliness of the film and the controversy surrounding its premise made his opinion piece, offered without charge, an attractive and substantive submission with an arguable point...

...Some additional checking on our part also would have led us to the lavish spinoff Web site that TechCentralStation.com has devoted solely to discrediting "Super Size Me."

Also see: MT's James Glassman page.

$3.9 million to the Institute on Religion and Democracy

NY Times
May 21, 2004

Conservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy

...a band of determined conservatives is advancing a plan to split the [Presbyterian] church along liberal and orthodox lines...With financing from a handful of conservative donors, including the Scaife family foundations, the Bradley and Olin Foundations and Howard and Roberta Ahmanson's Fieldstead & Company, the 23-year-old institute [Institute for Religion and Democracy] is now playing a pivotal role in the biggest battle over the future of American Protestantism since churches split over slavery at the time of the Civil War...

Also see: MT's Insitute on Religion and Democracy page

$1.7 million to the Alexis de Toqueville Institution

Eweek.com
May 18,2004
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Think Tank Claims Torvalds Didn't Write Linux

Linux wasn't written by Linus Torvalds, according to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based foundation.

Instead, Kenneth Brown, president of AdTI, claims that Linux is based on intellectual property "often taken or adapted without permission from material owned by other companies and individuals."

The announcement offers no proof of its assertions but says proof will be provided in later announcements—and eventually in a self-published book—that are based on "extensive interviews with more than two dozen leading technologists including Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie and Andrew Tanenbaum."

Microsoft in the past has supplied funding for the institution, which has published anti-open-source papers. In an eWEEK.com interview, senior fellow Gregory Fossedal refused to say who, if anyone, is sponsoring the institution's Linux project. "We don't discuss our funding," he said.

... Douglas A. Levin, president and CEO of Black Duck Software Inc., a company that makes software for source code and open-source license auditing, said, "This seems to be an effort of FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] attacking Linux because it is threatening the Windows franchise and other operating systems like Solaris."

Also see: MT's Alexis de Toqueville Institution page.

$5 million in grants with Samuel Huntington's name on them

NY Presss
May 5, 2004
John Dolan

HISPANIC PANIC

Samuel P. Huntington and the return of the Know-Nothings.

[EXCERPT]

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is a bigot, convinced that immigrant hordes are poisoning our Anglo-Protestant America. This in itself is not surprising; there have always been plenty of his kind on the American scene. Nor is it surprising that this bigot is a professor at Harvard. Nativism, in its 19th-century surge, was very much the darling cause of the New England elites.

What is surprising is that now, a century and a half after the Know-Nothings vanished in disgrace, Huntington feels free to promote his nativist hatred in print, and can be celebrated for doing so. Post-9/11 America, as John le Carre has said, has lost its mind. Huntington's screeching is a worthy contribution to the bedlam.

Read the full review at NY Press.

MT's Samuel Huntington page.

New from MediaTransparency.org
Jerry M. Landay
March 18, 2004

The Apparat

George W. Bush's back-door
political machine

It's anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional, and is working to create a one-party America

As America's mainstream media focuses on President Bush's campaign war chest, it's missing the story of some 350 right-wing political organizations loaded with manpower, money, and momentum, that are marching in lock-step to support the Republican Party and the president's re-election.

In "The Apparat: George W. Bush's Back-Door Political Machine," veteran reporter Jerry M. Landay details how this anti-democratic, anti-constitutional network, that operates outside of campaign funding constraints, is pursuing its unprecedented goal of a one-party state.

Read about it only at MediaTransparency.org, and then pass it on.

City Pages, Minneapolis
Brit Robson
March 10, 2004

Built to Fail

The federal No Child Left Behind law is threatening to wreck public education in Minnesota and elsewhere.

That's what it was designed to do.

[EXCERPT]

..."We have 7,200 kids in our district. The reality is, if just a few kids in a certain subgroup don't show up for the test, the whole district can be classified as failing and put under restriction," he [Edina, Minnesota School Superintendent Dr. Ken Dragseth] says. "That's just asinine. I tell this to parents and they say it can't be so, but it is. I'm an old math teacher and statistician, and I know when I've been had."

Also see: Media Transparency's Public School Privatization and Commercialization page.

$2 million to the National Endowment for Democracy

Media Transparency EXCLUSIVE
February 27, 2004

Venezuela at the Crossroads

The National Endowment for Democracy channeling money to outfit organizing recall campaign against Venezuela's president

by Bill Berkowitz
for Mediatransparency.org

POSTED FEBRUARY 27, 2004 --

For nearly two years, Venezuelan government officials have hurled accusations at the Bush Administration charging that it was involved in the aborted April 2002 coup aimed at overthrowing the country's democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez.

Now, on the cusp of a possible recall election, President Chavez says he has evidence proving that U.S. officials "met with rebel military officers [and] U.S. military officers acted in the coup." Chavez also pointed out that "the U.S. ambassador was at the Presidential Palace after the coup to applaud the dictator [Pedro Carmona]. The government of the United States must answer before the world about the deaths that occurred here in April of 2002."

The State Department's Richard Boucher dismissed Chavez's charges out of hand, saying that the accusations were meant to ""to divert attention" away from the referendum process currently underway in Venezuela," Venezuelanalysis.com reported. Boucher, however, acknowledged that the Bush Administration is providing "funding to groups that promote democracy and strengthen civil society in Venezuela and around the globe." Boucher claimed that the funds "are for the benefit of democracy, not to support any particular political faction."

One of the recipients of U.S. taxpayer money is a Venezuelan company called Sumate, the organization that has provided much of the logistical support for the signature collection process. Between September 2003 and September 2004, Sumate received more than $50,000 from the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy.

The "NED Report to the U.S. Dept. of State on Special Venezuela Funds," documents that the organization received a million dollars in April 2002, and since June of that year it awarded more than $800,000 to organizations working in Venezuela, according to VenezuelaFOIA.info. The non-profit Web site, sponsored by the Venezuela Solidarity Committee/National Venezuela Solidarity Network, found that among the organizations receiving funds were the Center for International Private Enterprise, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Read the full story.

People for the American Way
November 2003

Funding a Movement

Analysis of U.S. Department of Education Grantmaking Reveals Steady Stream of Public Funds to Support School Privatization

An initial People For the American Way analysis of federal education grants has uncovered a pattern of major — and at times unsolicited — grants made to a small cadre of pro-voucher private advocacy groups. The funds diverted to these groups total more than $75 million over the last three years, and were doled out by the U.S. Department of Education despite chronic underfunding of the Bush administration’s own landmark ‘No Child Left Behind’ education legislation.

“As the Bush administration has closed the tap on education funding, even abandoning much of its commitment to ‘No Child Left Behind’ and other critical education programs like IDEA and Headstart, money is flowing to private, pro-voucher advocacy groups,” said People For the American Way President Ralph G. Neas. “This administration is sending millions of taxpayer dollars to groups that have been built by an interconnected network of right-wing foundations dedicated to privatizing education in America.”

PFAW’s analysis traces the millions from the Department of Education to various initiatives sponsored by pro-voucher, pro-privatization groups such as the Black Alliance for Education Options, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Education Options, the Education Leaders Council, and the Center for Education Reform.

“The mission of the Department of Education is to advance and promote public education,” said Neas. “Why is the Department handing out $75 million to groups whose work undermines public education?”

Download the entire report in PDF format.

Also see: MT's Public School Privatization and Commercialization page.

Forward
January 30, 2004
ORI NIR

Groups Seek To Monitor Faith-Based Initiatives

List Compiled To Track Grants

[EXCERPT]

In a tacit admission of their inability to block President Bush's faith-based initiative, the Anti-Defamation League and other civil-liberties groups are shifting their fight to the field, in a concerted effort to monitor social service programs run by religious organizations.

The Forward has learned that ADL staffers in Washington last month spent days combing through a list of some 3,600 organizations and institutions across America that received new government funds to deliver services to the homeless. The goal was to determine which religious groups received funds, the size of each allocation and how much of the total $1.1 billion in grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development was funneled to religious organizations.

After the data was analyzed, computerized lists of the faith-based grantees were sent to ADL's 28 regional offices throughout the United States. Field officers with the league were instructed to use the lists to ensure that church-state guidelines are being respected as more religious groups receive federal funds.

"We are literally following the money" as it's disbursed from Washington to religious groups in the field, said ADL's top lawyer, Michael Lieberman.

The new strategy — which liberal groups acknowledge is highly inefficient, costly and unlikely to provide an adequate check against constitutional violations — is a result of two recent developments. First, a series of court rulings opened the way for the federal and state governments to fund social services through religious organizations. The other development is President Bush's insistence on bypassing congressional opposition and pushing his "charitable choice" initiative by executive order.

Also see: MT's Faith-Based Watch page.

$2.6 million to the Acton Institute
$15.7 million to the Cato Institute

Media Transparency
December 15, 2003
Bill Berkowitz

Corporate Captives

The Acton Institute attacks Health Care Without Harm and environmentally conscious religious activists

NEW original research for MediaTransparency.org

Health Care Without Harm is a Washington, DC-based environmental group that has taken more than its share of heat from the chemical industry over its campaigns against the use of mercury in medical equipment, the incineration of highly toxic medical waste and the use of pesticides, cleaners and disinfectants.

In recent weeks, a conservative religious public policy group has attacked not only the organization, but also religious leaders that support the group's campaign against the use of PVC, or vinyl plastic - the most widely used plastic in medical devices which Health Care Without Harm maintains is "harmful to patients, the environment and public health."

The Rev. Gerald Zandstra, director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Stewardship at the Acton Institute, has authored a far-ranging broadside warning religious leaders to be on their guard against "being used by radical environmental, leftist, organizations to whom they lend moral legitimacy," for their anti-corporate campaigns.

Read the full Media Transparency original report.

Related from Media Transparency: The Corporate/Think Tank Complex.

Also see: Media Transparency's Religious Sector page.

Media Transparency
November 19, 2003
Dave Johnson
The Commonweal Institute

Lowering the Bar

The conservative movement's well-funded attacks on trial lawyers

NEW original research for MediaTransparency.org

We've all heard the story of the woman who spilled hot coffee from a fast food joint in her lap, then sued the restaurant, and was subsequently awarded a huge sum of money for a seemingly stupid act. This is only one of many supposed examples of "out-of-control" lawsuits and outrageous damage awards that are causing our legal system to collapse, our businesses to fold, and our insurance rates to skyrocket. Right?

Maybe not. It turns out that these popular stories about lawsuits and their effects are almost always misleading, distorted, or outright lies. Our legal system is not collapsing, lawsuits are not causing businesses to fold, and damage awards are not why insurance rates are rising.

Why then do so many people accept these untruths about our legal system? Because, for more than a decade, consumers and trial lawyers have been under attack from a well-funded effort advocating "tort reform." Many reputable reports have shown that this "tort reform" movement is nothing more than an industry-funded public relations effort, using phony "grassroots" organizations that purport to be groups of concerned citizens.

Read the full Media Transparency original report.

Asia Times
November 15, 2003
Book Review
Piyush Mathur

The crisis of American journalism

A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag: America Today by Peggy Noonan

[EXCERPT]

"This war happens to be the reason he is president: because something big and bad and dark was coming, and he was the man to lead us through it ... My sense is that he walked into office knowing huge history was coming but not knowing when, what, where. Now he knows. I can quite imagine him thinking, This is the reason I'm here." (pg 60)

No, the above is not an excerpt from some Halloween story told to a five-year old by her mystical Californian mother: It is, in fact, a passage from an essay written by a veteran journalist affiliated to a prominent publishing establishment of the United States. I regret to report that, between the covers of A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag, I had to slog through 269 pages of such poppycock from Peggy Noonan, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a speechwriter for former president Ronald Reagan.

Had irrationalism, vacuity and tediousness been the book's only features, I would have probably opted out of reviewing it. Unfortunately, however, Noonan's rhetoric has the additional demerit of being pathetically truncated and therefore politically dangerous; a review is further warranted because the book exemplifies a certain crisis of representation that appears to have gripped mainstream American journalism past the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Read the full book review at Asia Times.

MT's Peggy Noonan page.

Mark Kleiman
November 11, 2003

The Washington Post defends No Child Left Behind

[EXCERPT]

Jay Matthews in the Washington Post tries to defend the No Child Left Behind Act from what Matthews calls "a host of myths and misinterpretations" by examining "10 statements about the law that experts say are heard often but are not firmly anchored in reality."

ABC News's The Note finds Matthew's piece "highly informative." I have no idea why. It seems to me a masterpiece of illogic.

...Now I wish I could feel absolutely certain that the publication of this story, written largely (though not entirely) in defense of a bill that is showering dollars on the testing and test-preparation industry had nothing to do with the fact that the Washington Post's parent company now also owns Kaplan Educational Systems, which advertises "effective, research-based programs to help schools raise K-12 state assessment scores, improve graduation rates and demonstrate the adequate yearly progress required by No Child Left Behind." (Note: Kaplan now has larger revenues than any other division of the company: higher, for example, than the Post itself.)

In the spirit of standardized testing, let's try a little fill-in-the blanks:

For the Post to publish a story blatantly illogical story with a slant that favors a sister company is a _______ of ________.

Read the post at Mark Kleiman's weblog.

MT's Public School Privatization and Commercialization page.

$9.4 million to the Ethics and Public Policy Center
$1.2 million to the Morley Publishing Group
publisher of Crisis magazine
$3.8 million to the Institute on Religion and Democracy
$172,000 to Robert P. George

Boston Globe Magazine
November 2, 2003
Charles P. Pierce, Globe Staff

The Crusaders

A powerful faction of religious and political conservatives is waging a latter-day counterreformation, battling widespread efforts to liberalize the American Catholic Church. And it has the clout and the connections to succeed.

[EXCERPT]

There is a glow to the priest when he talks. Something lights him up inside, and its intensity is increased by the mild way he says what he's saying. The words, harsh and unyielding, seem not so much a departure from the mainstream as they do a living refutation that there is any mainstream at all, not one to which the priest has to pay any mind, anyway.

He is talking about a futuristic essay he wrote that rosily describes the aftermath of a "relatively bloodless" civil war that resulted in a Catholic Church purified of all dissent and the religious dismemberment of the United States of America.

...The activity on the American Catholic right has been so vigorous that it has come to the attention of the various foundations that fund conservative causes generally in this country and to politicians as well. For example, papal biographer George Weigel works as a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, a think tank where Elliot Abrams once worked between his involvement in the Iran-contra scandal and his current employment in the Bush administration.

According to the records compiled by mediatransparency.org, a website that tracks the activities of conservative foundations, the center has received almost $9.5 million since 1985 from sources such as the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations. Among Weigel's projects was a series of seminars that he held in various eastern European countries.

...The meeting at the Cosmos Club [called to counter a meeting held between Catholic laity and church bigwigs over concern about the church's sexual abuse scandal] was a perfect amalgam of conservative Catholicism and conservative politics, both being addressed on parallel tracks. Besides [Peggy] Noonan, the gathering included Frank Hanna 3d, an Atlanta millionaire who was one of the founders of Newt Gingrich's GOPAC political operation and who, according to the Federal Election Commission, also has contributed heavily to Republican candidates all over the country. Robert George, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and a leading opponent of stem-cell research, also was at the meeting. George had been appointed to the council at the last minute by the first President Bush, and he served as a conservative gadfly on the panel throughout the Clinton years. Among other things, George regularly compares the abortion pill RU-486 to the Zyklon B gas used by the Nazis in concentration camps during World War II.

Central to the September meeting was Deal Hudson, the publisher of Crisis magazine, a journal of conservative Catholic thought...

In one of his first issues, Hudson wrote a prescient piece about a possible alliance between evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics. That same year, however, an outreach attempt by the largely Protestant Christian Coalition failed famously when, among other things, Catholic bishops raised, well, hell about political literature that the coalition had distributed outside Catholic churches. By 1999, however, the Christian Coalition had fallen into disarray, and, looking elsewhere for religious conservatives, the George W. Bush campaign hired Hudson to help peel off some of the Catholic vote.

...There are nearly 65 million Catholics in the United States, and 45 percent of them are registered voters. For years, as Republicans gained the overwhelming support of fundamentalist Protestants, Catholic voters remained evenly divided. According to a recent Gallup Poll, Catholic voters who identified themselves as either strongly Democratic or strongly Republican finished in a flat-footed tie at 33 percent apiece, as opposed to white Protestants, who were overwhelmingly Republican.

...As Robert George told The Washington Post in April 2001:

"In 1960, John Kennedy went from Washington down to Texas to assure Protestant preachers that he would not obey the pope. In 2001, George Bush came from Texas up to Washington to assure . . . Catholic bishops that he would."

...when the sexual abuse scandal exploded, Catholic conservatives were not only organized within the church, they were uniquely situated outside the church to frame the public discussion of the scandal. The meeting in Washington at the Cosmos Club was a perfect demonstration of both. It was a seamless blend of conservative political thought and conservative Catholic doctrine, particularly on the volatile issues regarding sex and reproductive choice.

The group, according to George, had come together "to give support to the bishops in their efforts to teach what the church believes on these issues." He made it quite clear that this includes the bishops regaining their lost authority to discipline Catholic politicians who try to finesse the church's positions on issues like abortion and gay marriage. George, for example, objected to the inclusion of former Clinton administration chief of staff Leon Panetta to the board appointed by the bishops to monitor the church's response to the sex abuse scandal, on the grounds that Panetta is insufficiently faithful to Catholic teachings on a number of issues, especially abortion.

...The influence of the Catholic conservatives within the church depends vitally on the patronage of the episcopate that has its source in Rome. However, in the United States, the conservatives have succeeded in injecting their ecclesiastical politics into the secular realm more effectively than the likes of Voice of the Faithful ever will...

Read this fantastic report at the Boston Globe's website in its entirety.

MT's Faith Based Watch page.

Associated Press
10/26/2003

Charter schools fail to match public schools on tests

[EXCERPT]

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Six companies responsible for teaching 17,000 Michigan's charter school students fail to produce test scores that match even low-scoring traditional public schools, records show.

The companies manage about $123.7 million in tax money each year.

The low- performing companies include three of the biggest for- profit charter school managers in the state, The Detroit News said Sunday.

They are Mosaica Foundation, The Leona Group and Charter School Administration Services. Together, they manage schools with more than a quarter of the 63,000 students in charter schools in the state.

The other three are Alpha-Omega Education Management, Black Star Education Management and CAN Associates, which have one school each.

The students at these schools often fall far below minimum standards in reading, writing and math, state education records show. The companies' schools also spend a smaller share of their budgets in the classroom than others.

Read the full AP report.

And in Minneapolis: Charter Schools get lower marks.

MT's Public School Privatization and Commercialization page.

$3.2 million to Ward Connerly's American Civil Rights Institute

SFGate.com
Oct 8, 2003

Prop. 54 defeated soundly

Huge loss for Ward Connerly, as proposition loses by almost 2 to 1 margin

Proposition 54, a constitutional amendment proposed by UC Regent Ward Connerly to ban most state agencies from collecting racial and ethnic data died Tuesday night after opponents successfully focused the attention on its possible effects on health care.

Connerly proposed the initiative, he said, because the practice of classifying people by race is antiquated and divisive.

But opponents had attacked Prop. 54 as disastrous for public health, saying it would rob doctors and health agencies of the information needed to identify and develop programs to address problems specific to certain groups. They also said it would hurt public education. They characterized it as a misguided attempt to pretend that race no longer matters and said the initiative would just hide the disparities.

Read the full story at the SFGate.com website.

MT's Ward Connerly report.

St. Petersburg Times
September 25, 2003

State fund buys school operator

If the deal stands, the fund that provides for pensions of Florida public school teachers will own a company [Edison] that privatizes school management.

Florida's state pension fund is investing $174-million in a controversial for-profit school management company.

Through one of its money managers, Liberty Partners, the pension fund has agreed to buy out the shareholders of Edison Schools Inc., taking the New York company private.

In effect, the fund that provides for the retirement pensions of Florida teachers and other public employees will own a company that has played a leading role in privatizing school management.

Josh Marshall Comments:

So, you start a company to privatize education and take on the teachers unions. Your company fails miserably both in terms of the market and academic success. Then after you've hollowed the company out to cover your other bad debts friendly pols come along to bail you out with a couple hundred million from the teachers' (and other public employees') pension fund. I love symmetry.

Read the full report in the St Petersburg Times.

MT's Public School Privatization and Commercialization page.

Mark O'Keefe
Newhouse News Service
VALUES AND PHILANTHROPY
September 18, 2003

Foundation Excels at Fueling Conservative Agenda

[EXCERPT]

Name a conservative idea -- whether it's school vouchers, faith-based initiatives or the premise that there's a worldwide clash of civilizations -- and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is apt to have its fingerprints on it.

Lion House: Home of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

...Headed by a former Republican Party official and enjoying strong ties to the Bush administration, the foundation is credited with producing more than a decade of intellectual fuel for conservative lawmakers.

...On Oct. 7, in a ceremony at the Library of Congress, up to four $250,000 Bradley Prizes will be given to "intellectual entrepreneurs." In typical Bradley style, the annual prizes will have no strings attached.

..."At Olin and later at Bradley, our overarching purpose was to use philanthropy to support a war of ideas to defend and help recover the political [emphasis added] imagination of the (nation's) founders -- the self-evident truth that rights and worth are a legacy of the creator [emphasis added] -- not the result of some endless revaluing of values," said [former head Michael] Joyce, who left Bradley last year to head a think tank promoting faith-based initiatives.

...The conservative scholarship [sponsored by Bradley] has a way of influencing Republican policies in the White House and at statehouses.

Read the full report from Mark O'Keefe.

MT's Bradley Foundation page.

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