The Hartford Courant raises some interesting questions about just what the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund - a right-wing Virginia non-profit organization overseen by the likes of Ed Meese, William Bradford Reynolds, and Al Regnery - is doing with the funds it has been raising because it seems like most of it is going to toward fund-raising, salary for its leadership, and to prop up right-wing organizations to which they have ties, like The American Spectator, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Federalist Society :

Tens of thousands of Americans have contributed to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund after reading letters like Stephanie Lawlor’s. But while those donations total millions every year, the fund spends only pennies on the dollar directly assisting officers facing criminal charges, state and federal filings show.

Over the past five years, the charity collected more than $13 million, primarily through direct-mail pitches. But most of that money — more than $9 million — went right back to the professional fundraisers hired by the nonprofit legal defense fund.

Last year, for example, the group spent 81 cents on fundraising for every dollar collected, according to federal tax forms. After other expenses, the defense fund last year devoted only about 8 cents on the dollar to charitable grants, the tax forms show.

That grant money — about $275,000 — was less than the group’s co-founders paid themselves in salary and benefits for the year. David H. Martin, a Washington lawyer who serves as chairman, collected $156,000, while Alfred Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator Magazine, received $81,000 for the part-time job of secretary-treasurer. In addition, the charity paid $54,000 into retirement accounts for Martin and Regnery.

In a telephone interview earlier this month, Martin said the charity is at the mercy of expensive mail solicitations. "It’s hard to raise money through direct mail. Why? Because postage is so expensive," he said. "It’s just a killer."

Martin said he believed the group’s fundraising efficiency had consistently improved in recent years. But federal filings suggest just the opposite, showing the cost of raising money increasing each of the last five years, from about 60 cents in fundraising costs for every dollar raised in 2003, to 81 cents last year.

At the same time, administrative costs have soared, particularly for salaries and rent. For years, the legal defense fund was run out of Martin’s law office. But the nonprofit now subleases space at Regnery’s financially strapped American Spectator. The initial rent in 2003 was $9,000 a year, but the nonprofit agreed last year to increase its payments to $42,000 a year — about a third of the total rent for the American Spectator’s space. Martin said the rent covers a large amount of storage space and offices for himself and a clerk, and he said he thought the rent was fair.

And even as the charity devoted only a small fraction of its budget to grants, not all of the money doled out went to help accused officers. Instead, the charity’s executives have sent a sizable and growing amount of cash to a small number of universities and conservative policy groups not mentioned in their fundraising pitches.

The charity’s biggest beneficiary last year, for example, was not a police officer, but the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a national campus-based think tank that promotes "limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy, and moral norms."

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund sent $75,000 to the institute last year, part of at least $360,000 the defense fund has pledged. Regnery, secretary-treasurer of the defense fund, is chairman of the institute’s board of trustees. The charity has also given tens of thousands of dollars to the Federalist Society, described by The American Conservative magazine as a "training ground for young conservative lawyers"; to the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University in Virginia, a leading center of conservative and libertarian legal studies; and to a project at McDaniel College — Martin’s alma mater.

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This info come from the Vision America website:

Harvest Point Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, where Vision America is headquartered, extended an invitation to Dr. [Rick] Scarborough to be their Senior Pastor. Dr. Scarborough agreed to accept the position on the condition that the Church allow him to continue his work as President of Vision America and Vision America Action. The church family agreed to hire Dr. Scarborough a full-time church administrator and three more full and part time ministers to assist with pastoral duties.

This info comes from The Daily Sentinel, a newpapers in Nacogdoches, Texas:

A woman and a child were visibly injured Monday in an afternoon wreck on state Hwy. 7 East.

Rescue workers used the jaws of life to remove the victims, whose identities were not immediately known, from the mangled shell of a blue Honda CR-V.

According to other drivers involved in the accident, Ivan Pierce of Nacogdoches was driving east in a Timpson ISD maintenance truck when he slowed for a vehicle preparing to turn. The truck behind Pierce, driven by Rick Scarborough of Nacogdoches was unable to avoid colliding with Pierce, pushing the vehicle into oncoming traffic, where it collided head-on with the westbound Honda.

The DPS officer investigating the accident was not immediately available to confirm details of the wreck.

The two occupants of the Honda were placed on stretchers and taken to the hospital. Pierce, who suffered cuts and bruising on his face, declined medical treatment, as did Scarborough, who appeared uninjured.

I wonder if it’s the same Rick Scarborough. 

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Via Good as You we find out that the National Organization for Marriage has launched a petition drive to thank the Mormon Church for its deep involvement in the passage of Prop 8 and to declare solidarity with them:

We write firstly to express our deep gratitude to you and the entire LDS community for the large and impressive contributions of your church and its members in protecting marriage in California and Arizona.

Anyone who participated in this process has come to admire the competence, diligence and moral courage that so many members of your faith community displayed as part of this coalition effort—as Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, and people of other faith communities all came together to fight this great battle for marriage.

But we write for an even more important purpose: to express our outrage at the vile and indecent attacks directed specifically and uniquely at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members because of your courage in standing up for marriage.

The best thing about this is the name they have chosen for their new effort - Above the Hate.com.  Its name is especially ironic considering the list of those who rushed to add their signatures to the letter:

Maggie Gallagher

Donald E. Wildmon

James C. Dobson, Ph.D.

Charles W. Colson

Tony Perkins

Paul Weyrich

Dr. Gary Bauer

Bishop Harry Jackson

Richard Land

Tom Minnery

Ron Prentice

John Stemberger

Phil Burress

Kelly Shackelford

Regina Griggs

Wendy Wright

Janice Crouse, PhD

That’s right - the leaders of the professional anti-gay lobby are "rising above the hate" to thank the Mormon Church for helping them deny gays and lesbians their basic equality.

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On Friday, Focus on the Family posted a short interview with David Barton in which Barton explains that his mission in life is to explain American history from a “Providential perspective,” which means explaining that every aspect of life functions best when it is in accord with biblical principles:

The Bible clearly teaches that the way people view their own history affects the way they behave. God wants us to know our history and learn its lessons. At WallBuilders, we present American history, and we do so with a Providential perspective. In short, history not only shows God’s workings and plans but it also demonstrates the effectiveness of biblical principles when applied to church, education, government, economics, family, entertainment, military or any other aspect of life.

I have to say that this is a rather startling admission from Barton, who normally tries to couch his pseudo-history as part of a mission to present “America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built.”  But now we finally have it straight from the horse’s mouth that his real goal is to ensure that biblical principles guide education, government, economics, family, entertainment, military, and every other aspect of American life.

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The San Francisco Chronicle has a good article on how the folks behind Yes on 8 are trying to bar the Campaign for California Families, Randy Thomasson, and Mat Staver from getting involved in the on-going legal dispute because of the latter’s extreme anti-gay views, which Yes on 8 fears will make them all look bad: 

The group, now known as the Campaign for Children and Families, is run by Randy Thomasson, who for years has been one of California’s most visible opponents of gay rights and what he bills as "the homosexual agenda."

The people behind Prop. 8 have been butting heads with Thomasson for years, arguing that his efforts to outlaw same-sex marriage and curb domestic partnership arrangements are a long step further than a majority of California voters is willing to go.

In 2005 and again in January, Thomasson and his allies proposed initiatives that not only would bar same-sex marriage but that also "voids or makes unenforceable" rights conferred by California law on couples, gay or heterosexual, registered as domestic partners, including community property, child custody, hospital visitation and insurance benefits.

"It was like the nuclear option to obliterate the entire domestic partners law," [Andrew Pugno, general counsel for the Yes on Prop. 8 campaign] said. "We were constantly hassled by that organization, who thought we weren’t aggressive enough."

…

But the disputes between the groups have grown in the past few days, with Thomasson launching an all-out attack against the Supreme Court for accepting the challenge to Prop. 8, a court decision Pugno and others from ProtectMarriage.com had welcomed.

"If the court disobeys the constitution by voiding Prop. 8, it will ignite a voter revolt," Thomasson said in statement released after the court agreed Wednesday to hear arguments over the validity of the constitutional amendment. "The court is playing with fire by threatening to destroy the people’s vote on marriage."

Pugno and others from the Prop. 8 campaign want to avoid such fiery challenges and threats to the court and keep matters on a quiet legal level until the court rules on same-sex marriage sometime after March.

"What we are not doing is discussing the possibility of recalling justices who oppose us," Ron Prentice, chairman of the Yes on Prop. 8 effort, said in an e-mail to supporters Wednesday. "Making threats to recall justices from office is counterproductive and harmful to our chances of winning in court."

So the “moderates” who want to deny equality for gays are afraid that people like Thomasson, who’s been busy freaking out about everything the use of “Party A” and “Party B” on marriage licenses and proposals for Harvey Milk Day, are going to make them look too extreme?  I think that, considering that they just spent tens of millions of dollars to getting California voters to strip gay couples throughout the state of their constitutional right to marriage, it’s a little late for the Yes on 8 troops to start worrying about looking like of bunch of anti-gay extremists.

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It was just last week that the National Black Republican Association unilaterally absolved White Americans of their sins and guilt.  But now it looks like they didn’t just do it out of the kindness of their hearts and are now expecting something in return, namely that Barack Obama issue an official proclamation apologizing for the Democratic Party’s 150-year history of racism. And just to make it easier, the NBRA is put together its own draft version for him to use:

We, black American citizens of the United States and the National Black Republican Association, declare and assert:

WHEREAS, the healing of wounds begins with an apology, and the Democratic Party has never apologized for their horrific atrocities and racist practices against black Americans during the past 150 years, nor held accountable for the residual impact that those atrocities and practices are having on us today,

[Dozens of purported examples of Democrats being racist over the last 150 years]

WHEREAS, the Democratic Party’s use of deception and fear to intimidate black Americans into voting for Democrats is consistent with the Democratic Party’s heritage of racism that included sanctioning of slavery and kukluxery -  a perversion of moral sentiment among leaders of the Democratic Party; and the Democratic Party’s racist legacy bode ill until this generation of black Americans,

NOW, THEREFORE, for the documented atrocities and accumulated wrongs inflicted upon black Americans, we submit this petition to the head of the Democratic Party, Barack Hussein Obama, for a formal proclamation of apology for the Democratic Party’s 150-year history of racism.

For good measure, the NBRA also worked in its own unique explanation of the Republican Party’s so-called “Southern Strategy,” which it also cites as further proof that the Democrats are racist:

WHEREAS, Democrats expressed little, if any, concern when the racially segregated South voted solidly for Democrats; yet unfairly deride Republicans because of the thirty-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party that began in the 1970’s with President Richard Nixon’s "Southern Strategy," which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get fair-minded people in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values, and who were discriminating against blacks.

Of course, as we’ve pointed out before both President Bush and former RNC chair Ken Mehlman have apologized for the party’s use of the Southern Strategy … but apparently it is the Democrats who should be apologizing for not commending Richard Nixon for finally getting voters in the South to stop discriminating against blacks.

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As Mike Huckabee travels the country promoting his new book, the overarching theme seems to be “It Should Have Been Me,” in that the book is essentially a 200 page gripe about how the Republican Party lost its way and ended up losing the election primarily because it failed to choose him as its nominee:

The former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who won eight states and more than four million votes in the Republican Presidential primaries, spent Election Night at home in Little Rock. Eating takeout in the den with his family and a few staffers, Huckabee wasn’t surprised to see Barack Obama win, although he couldn’t help but think that things might not have turned out the way they did had he been the nominee. “It would’ve been very different,” he said the other day. “Because I would’ve campaigned that the economy was headed toward meltdown. And I was saying this back when I was getting laughed at by the Wall Street Journal and pilloried by the National Review. They were just dicin’ and slicin’ me for not following the company line.”

And while his book is basically an extended attack on Mitt Romney and all that he represents, it looks like Huckabee doesn’t exactly have warm feelings about Sarah Palin - or rather, he’s really miffed that all the insiders who wrote him off suddenly rallied about Palin when the only difference between the two was that, unlike her, he was arguably qualified for the position:

Asked about Sarah Palin, he responded, “She, uh, was an appropriate choice, because she put John McCain back in the game.” That was the get-along answer, but a few minutes later the new, aggrieved Huckabee resurfaced. He recalled, “It was funny that all through the primary—I mean literally up until McCain got enough delegates to win—people said, ‘You know, Huckabee’s really running for Vice-President. Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ And from that day forward, when I actually was no longer running for President, nobody ever said, ‘Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ ” Neither was he quite so unperturbed by the Palin pick: “I was scratching my head, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.’ It wasn’t so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn’t prepared.”

I think that is actually a really smart observation on Huckabee’s part. Why was it that all the Religious Right and Republican insiders who dismissed Huckabee, with his ten years of experience as governor and staunch record on their issues, rallied around Palin with her limited time in office and a record utterly devoid of accomplishments?

And yes, we are looking at you, Gary Bauer.

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Fresh off of urging his millions of supporters to protect “traditional marriage” by passing Proposition 8 in California, evangelical guru Rick Warren announces a new partnership with Reader’s Digest to spread his personal brand of “Purpose Driven” Christianity across the nation: 

The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., and Dr. Rick Warren, Pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church and the author of the worldwide best seller, "The Purpose Driven Life," today announced a partnership to produce an inspirational multimedia platform called The Purpose Driven Connection.

Together the organizations will pool their international resources to produce and publish this Purpose Driven platform to help people who are seeking their purpose in life and wish to interact with others on their spiritual journeys. The platform will provide a suite of bundled multimedia tools: "The Purpose Driven Connection," a quarterly magazine; Small Group study materials delivered in DVDs, workbooks and downloadable discussion guides; and a state-of-the-art Christian social networking website.

"We are excited about this new partnership and its unprecedented potential for international impact," said Warren, who will serve as Editor-in-Chief and be heavily involved in the conception of each element. "The Purpose Driven Connection represents more than simply integrated multimedia resources; it will become a platform for a movement of people to change the world."

"We are delighted to be working with Rick Warren and the Saddleback team," said Alyce Alston, President of RDA’s Home & Garden and Health & Wellness affinities. "This is one of our company’s most important and far-reaching ventures ever. Together we will create a category-busting multimedia suite that will help millions of people in their daily lives, including those who already follow the Purpose Driven principles as well as seekers everywhere looking for greater fulfillment."

Apparently, while Reader’s Digest would presumably never agree to a partnership with someone like James Dobson, they have no problem partnering with Warren, even though he admits that the only difference between himself and Dobson is a question of tone.

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