It's that time of year again when we all cough up our own hard-earned $25 to get our hands on the latest installment of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute's hot conservative women calendar:
Following in the tradition of past calendars from the Luce Policy Institute, Pretty in Mink celebrates smart, conservative women role models ... with flair.
We took some of your favorite leaders of today’s conservative movement on a journey back in time, and made them up into glamorous movie stars of classic Hollywood. Back when the big screen was a little more glamorous, women were a little more feminine, the men a little more charming—and the world a little less politically correct.
We’ve saved Clare Boothe Luce herself for the last month of the year; we think you’ll agree that the legacy of this conservative icon makes her an appropriate ending for our calendar. And every single one of the other beautiful women featured in Pretty in Mink is one hundred percent a “Luce Lady.” Whether they’re speaking for us regularly—on college campuses, at our Conservative Women’s Network luncheons in D.C, and at regional Luce events—or they’re working directly with staff to reach out to students, these women contribute so much to the Institute, and more importantly, to the next generation of women leaders.
It is with pride that we showcase these talented Luce Ladies in our 2009 Pretty in Mink calendar. We hope you enjoy the show!
The Players
Miss January — Kellyanne Conway Miss February — Star Parker Miss March – Susan Phalen Miss April – Nonie Darwish Miss May – Mary Katharine Ham Miss June – Michelle Malkin Miss July – Amanda Carpenter Miss August – Sandy Liddy Bourne Miss September – Ann Coulter Miss October – Kate Obenshain Miss November – Miriam Grossman, M.D. Miss December – Clare Boothe Luce
We wrote about Grassfire.org a few times back in 2007 during the height of the immigration debate and then, once the issue died down, stopped paying attention to them because, with their core issues no longer on the table, they seemed to lose focus and stagnated.
Grassfire.org has launched this “Join The Resistance” campaign to give grassroots conservatives a place to join together around the common goal of holding off as much of the Obama agenda as possible. Our goal is to bring together 1 million Resisters by Inauguration Day. That would give us one-tenth of the 10 million Obama loyalists who were recruited during the campaign, but we believe 1 million equipped Resisters can make a difference.
The key will be providing web-based structures that truly equip conservatives to Resist. We begin here – by building this email network to give us the ability to respond immediately to each and every effort by the Obama administration to undermine our liberties. We plan to add to this platform social networking that will connect Resisters to others in their communities. We are also exploring ways to put the tools of the Resistance into your hands through mobile phone-based apps that allow you to Resist on the go. We will use fax, email, phone, and personal visit campaigns to press our case with leaders in Washington, D.C., who need to know that millions oppose Obama’s rush to the Left …
Resisting is just the first step. That is why we propose a three-phased recovery for conservatives: Resist, Rebuild, and Restore. We believe that resisting will create newfound unity among conservatives. Out of this, we must then Rebuild our structures. New, invigorating models must be developed that inform, equip and bring together conservatives and prepare us to return our ideas to political prominence. The Internet will be a key battleground The Left has moved far ahead in its embrace of and usage of new 2.0 technologies. The Rebuild process will leave Americans with a clear ideological and practical choice between the Left’s statist model and our model based on God-given individual liberties.
Having rebuilt, we can then Restore conservative ideas to leadership by winning elections. Ultimately, a movement’s ideas must result in electoral victories because that is the basis for legitimate authority and ultimately for implementing one’s ideas. Grassfire.org will soon be announcing a breakthrough effort that will allow our members to get engaged directly in the election process. Stay tuned.
Resist. Rebuild. Restore. It’s not an easy path for grassroots conservatives, but it is a clear path. We know what we must do. And it begins with resisting rightly — respecting the new President but never backing away from the God-given ideals of freedom and liberty upon which this nation was founded.
I have to say that the Right’s sudden penchant for referring to itself as some sort of “resistance movement” is taking on a militia-esque tone that is getting to be a little bit disturbing.
Just last week I was noting on Janet Porter had squandered whatever tiny shred remained of her credibility when she joined the crackpot right-wing conspiracy theory that Barack Obama (if that is his real name) was not a natural born citizen of the United States and was therefore ineligible to be President.
Today, she takes to the pages of WorldNetDaily, the home of insane right-wing ravings, to explain as cleary as she can that the very existence of the nation is at stake if Obama is not stopped and that "the gallows for our freedoms are already being built":
The good news is the real election hasn't taken place yet. The Electoral College doesn't meet until Dec. 15. That gives us less than a month to find the answers to the looming questions regarding whether Barack Obama meets the constitutional requirements for the office of president ... If you believe in life, liberty and the family, you already are a target. The henchmen are selected; the gallows for our freedoms are already being built. And the only candidate in history to never move an inch to the center during the campaign has no intentions of changing his agenda of outlawing our viewpoint with the "unfairness doctrine," "thought crimes," "The Employment Non Discrimination Act" the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and all the rest. As I wrote about in my book, "The Criminalization of Christianity" (which will surely come true if we don't act now), "Never fail to do the right thing for fear that the opposition will attack you in response. The other side can and will attack you anyway, at a time of their own choosing rather than yours, regardless of whether you act" ... In four years, we won't be able to recognize what's left of our country. And if you think taking on this issue right now is hard, try doing it when our radio airwaves are shut down and our freedoms are stripped from us, as he has promised to do. And with Obama's promise to pass the so-called Freedom of Choice Act as "the first thing" he does, you can say goodbye to the notion of protecting unborn children again – and goodbye to every law in all 50 states that notifies parents, keeps our tax dollars from footing the abortion bill and prevents even a single partial-birth abortion ... With God, all things are possible. Eight years ago the election was called for Al Gore, and he never took office. If God is the same today as He was yesterday, He can still split the sea, raise the dead, stop the sun and reverse the results of the popular vote if the basic requirements of the Constitution are not met in the candidate.
Also pushing the case that Obama is ineligible for the office is Alan Keyes and his running mate Wiley Drake, who are claiming that they are really doing Obama a favor by trying to eliminate any "doubt as to the legitimacy of his tenure":
In response to questions about why the suit was being filed, Ambassador Alan Keyes commented, “I and others are concerned that this issue be properly investigated and decided before Senator Obama takes office. Otherwise there will be a serious doubt as to the legitimacy of his tenure. This doubt would also affect the respect people have for the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. I hope the issue can be quickly clarified so that the new President can take office under no shadow of doubt. This will be good for him and for the nation.”
The scary thing is that these people and their views are not only not shunned by the Republican Party and its right-wing base, but are actually embraced - after all, Porter was co-chair of Mike Huckabee's Faith and Family Values Coalition during his presidential campaign and Keyes was once the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.
I don’t write much about Michael Savage here, mainly because Media Matters covers him so well but also because I think he’s an insufferable jerk and a fraud. But today Media Matters has a typically stupid quote from him that is actually kind of relevant to the things I write about here:
Discussing "children" on the November 14 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage stated: "I'm as good an expert as any. I have found in my life that most of the Ph.D. experts on children are either gay or crazy and were never married. Or if they were married, they either tried to kill their wife or were in rehab for a few years, and then came out and went into psychotherapy to find out why they killed, or attempted to kill. And then they washed it all away, and suddenly they're experts on childrearing."
Interesting. Which category would James Dobson fall into?
James C. Dobson, Ph.D., is founder and chairman of Focus on the Family … [and] a licensed psychologist in the state of California and a licensed marriage, family and child counselor in both California and Colorado. Dobson was for 14 years an Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, and served for 17 years on the Attending Staff of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles in the Division of Child Development and Medical Genetics. He has an earned Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (1967) in the field of child development.
And since I’m already writing a post about Savage, I guess I may as well just go ahead and mention this as well:
Nationally-syndicated talk show host Michael Savage is set to interview former German member of the Hitler Youth, Hilmar von Campe this Tuesday, November 18
The program will focus on similarities, which von Campe sees between the rise of totalitarianism under Hitler and the current social and political trends inside the United States.
"Every day brings this nation closer to a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss," writes von Campe, now a U.S. citizen, and author of "Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America."
It seems that the big scoop Jerome Corsi uncovered before he was deported from Kenya is that Barack Obama “backed ruthless, foreign thug” in Kenya. WorldNetDaily explains:
Sen. Barack Obama designated a personal aide as his direct contact for the 2007 Kenyan presidential campaign of Raila Odinga, who later was appointed prime minister after his election loss was followed by widespread, deadly violence that destroyed or damaged 800 Christian churches, according to e-mails obtained by WND senior staff writer Jerry Corsi during a trip to Kenya.
WND even provides concrete visual proof:
The e-mails, apparently sent by Obama himself, referenced the senator's aide, Mark Lippert. The e-mails were provided to WND by an insider in Kenya who fled Odinga's Orange Democratic political party and requested anonymity because of the danger of retaliation.
The e-mails, identified as coming from Obama's Senate office, are addressed to "railaaodinga" at a yahoo.com address.
A WND e-mail to the same Obama address generated an automated response and a list of contacts for Obama's offices. A WND e-mail sent to the Odinga e-mail address didn't generate a response.
One e-mail purportedly from Obama, dated Dec. 22, 2006, read, "I will kindly wish that all our correspondence [be] handled by Mr Mark Lippert. I have already instructed him. This will be for my own security both for now and in future."
It is reproduced here with the e-mail address of the person who forwarded it to WND redacted:
Well, color me convinced. Since it is glaringly obvious that nobody could ever fake something as intricate as an email, I contacted Corsi’s media rep, Tim Bueler, as instructed to do at the bottom of the WND article, to pass on my congratulations regarding this amazing scoop. I was shocked by Bueler’s totally authentic and in no way completely made up and forged by me response:
The Violence Against Women Act, which now costs the federal government $1 billion a year, has spawned an industry that undermines Constitutional protections, thwarts welfare reform, weakens military readiness, fosters immigration fraud, and is harmful to families. This conference will probe how to rein in a federal law that increasingly encroaches on the personal lives of millions of Americans.
Just check out the forum’s agenda:
9:30 Feminist Fatherphobia and Domestic Violence Phyllis Schlafly – Eagle Forum
10:00 How Marriage Protects Against Domestic Violence Robert Rector – Heritage
10:45 How Domestic Violence Policies Weaken Families and Harm Children Stephen Baskerville, PhD – Patrick Henry College Foundation
11:15 VAWA: Victimizing All Taxpayers Act? Benjamin Foster, PhD, CPA – University of Louisville College of Business
11:45 Impact on Military Readiness Elaine Donnelly – Center for Military Readiness
It’s easy to understand that “marriage protects against domestic violence” provided that you share Schlafly’s view that wives cannot be raped by their husbands.
The Hill reports that even though John McCain has repeatedly and explicitly promised to nominate judges like John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the Right is still a little unsure that they can trust him and so they decided to work explicit language into the GOP platform in order to send him a clear message:
Republican conservatives have given John McCain a warning on what kind of justices he may appoint to the Supreme Court as president.
Their message: no surprises.
Authors of the 2008 GOP platform have included specific language urging Sen. McCain (Ariz.), the party’s nominee, not to appoint “stealth nominees” to the court. That language was the result of lobbing by the conservative activists.
…
The platform makes clear that McCain should appoint jurists who have clearly defined views of constitutional interpretation.
It states: “We oppose stealth nominations to the federal bench, and especially the Supreme Court, whose lack of a clear and distinguished record leaves doubt about their respect for the Constitution.”
Conservative activists led by Manuel Miranda, chairman of the Third Branch Conference, a coalition of conservative leaders active on judicial matters, began pushing for the platform changes in May. It began a minuet between the McCain campaign and its conservative skeptics that eventually shaped the presidential platform.
The last time the Right was sending McCain explicit messages about what it expected from him, they were telling him that his choices of running mate were patentlyunacceptable, to which he responded by utterlycapitulating and giving them everything they wanted in Sarah Palin. In fact, it seems as if his caving to their demands on Palin has actually helped assuage their concerns about his willingness to do their bidding:
Conservative leaders who worked on the platform said the strength of the document and McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate eased concerns that lingered right up until the convention.
“The two combined changed everything,” said [David] Keene [of the American Conservative Union.]
One thing that has always confused me is the Right Wing’s obsession with recounting the racist history of the Democratic Party and the anti-slavery origins of the Republican Party that inevitably seems to end right around the mid-1960s.
For example, we wrote a report about right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton a few years back that examined a video he produced called “American History in Black and White” in which he diligently recounts the atrocities committed by early members of what was then the Democratic Party and ties them into positions held by current members of the party:
Barton claims that Democrats hailed the Dred Scott decision because it affirmed “their belief that it was proper to have slavery and hold African Americans in bondage.” He then takes it a step further, making a direct comparison between this decision and modern Democrats’ support of reproductive choice for women, claiming “Democrats have largely taken that same position in unborn human life, that an unborn human is really just disposable property to do with as one wishes. African Americans were the victims of this disposable property ideology a century and a half ago, and still are today … For over a century and a half, Democrats have wrongly argued that some human life is merely disposable personal property and black Americans have suffered most under this philosophy.”
On and on he went, until he reached the for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, at which point his “history lesson” ended.
This tactic continues even today – just last week the Wall Street Journal ran a piece accusing the Democratic National Committee of posting a history of the party on its website that is “so sanitized of historical reality it makes Stalin look like historian David McCullough.” Not surprisingly, the WSJ piece received prominence on the website of the National Black Republican Association, whose leader, Frances Rice, has made it her mission to inform the world about what “Democrats have done in the past and are doing now to black people … They are keeping blacks in virtual slavery."
The obvious question raised by all of this is not why the Democrats are reluctant to discuss it, but why right-wingers who are obsessed with it never manage to explain the so-called “Southern Strategy” employed by Richard Nixon to win over traditional Southern Democrats who were angry by the party’s emerging pro-civil rights positions. As Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips explained it:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Ronald Regan’s strategist Lee Atwater was even more blunt about the reasoning behind the strategy:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Given that, beginning in the late 1960s, the GOP made a concerted and successful to court Southern voters who had traditionally been supporters of the Democratic Party which, as the Right loves to point out, was fundamentally racist, it has been confusing to understand how those who hammer this point rationalize this obvious disconnect. Usually, they do so by not talking about it.
But finally someone shed some light on this question when the NBRA’s Rice explained the history of the “Southern Strategy” at a sparsely attended conference earlier this month. You see, it was not that Nixon and the GOP were courting racist Southern voters; Nixon was really just trying to get the “fair-minded people in the South to stop discriminating against blacks”:
That strategy was designed to get the fair-minded people in the South to stop discriminating against blacks and to stop supporting a party that did not share their values. So those fair-minded ones who migrated to the Republican Party did so. They joined us, we did not join the racists.
If Rice's history is correct, how does she explain that both President Bush
and former RNC chair Ken Mehlman apologized for the Southern Strategy, with Mehlman admitting in 2005 that "Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
Last month, the Washington Times debuted a new weekly column by NewsBusters editor Matthew Sheffield. Fresh off his latest scoop that “liberals [are] more profane than conservatives,” he returned to the pages of the Times to exhort conservative activists to realize the dangers of Wikipedia and work to counter it by spending more time editing entries to better reflect their right-wing views:
Conservatives seems to be making another critical error regarding the online encyclopedia on the question of political bias. You can't entirely blame them either, considering that Wikipedia seems to have tilted leftward in a number of cases.
…
The reason for this is in the editing. Anyone can alter Wikipedia's entries, in most cases without even bothering to register for an account. What this means in practical terms is that people with enough determination to force their viewpoints on Wikipedia can do so.
Sheffield urges conservative activists not to retreat to the safety of Conservapedia because, well frankly, it’s a joke, and instead head once more into the breach by dedicating hours of their lives online to editing articles until they finally gain control:
Faced with such bias, many people on the right seem willing to retreat from the Wiki Wars, resorting to legal maneuvering to block particularly noxious entries and crying foul about Wiki unfairness. Still others on the right have withdrawn to their own site, Conservapedia.
There is nothing wrong with such efforts, but they are incomplete - incomplete because they fail to recognize that liberal bias at Wikipedia isn't like bias at ABC or CBS. These institutions are dominated by liberals, true, but their systematic structure is such that the ability for people on the right to push for fairness is severely limited.
That is not the case with Wikipedia, a participatory medium in which those who are most active enjoy the most influence. It's time for the right to dust off its hands and engage in some old-fashioned activism.
As we’ve noted severaltimes in the past, the National Black Republican Association is a fringe right-wing group that seems to have little in the way of staff or money, yet still manages to generate attention for itself every election cycle by running ridiculous ads and then waiting for the media to report on them:
[NBRA Chair Frances] Rice managed to put up a "Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican" billboard in South Carolina this year, and, leading up to the elections, ran a radio ad in swing states. In the ad a black woman says, "Dr. King was a real man," and another responds, "You know he was a Republican."
Rice said she wanted to start a conversation about the history of the Republican Party. The tactic proved its worth in media coverage. She ticks off the news outlets that covered the campaign.
"I spent a few thousand and garnered half a million in free coverage by my estimate," Rice said.
Given the success the NBRA has had with this tactic, they apparently have bigger plans in mind:
A Sarasota-based group that grabbed national headlines when it put up several billboards in Florida proclaiming "Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican" says it will be doing it again.
This time the National Black Republican Association says it would like to put up 50 of the controversial billboards in Denver. The group wants the billboard to be up in time for the Democratic National Convention which is scheduled for August 25th - 28th.
Hmm … considering that the convention is now less than two weeks away, that seems like an expensive and almost impossible task. But just to make sure, I called the advertising specialists at The Media Team in Denver to inquire about the cost and possibility of actually doing so.
When I told them that I was interested in finding out the cost and availability of 50 billboards in Denver for the week of the convention, they literally laughed at me. They then explained that the only things available at this late date would be Spanish language and low traffic billboards and, when I asked how much it would cost, hypothetically, to rent just one prime location billboard for the week of the convention, the estimate was $25,000, with the rates for other billboards ranging from $5,000 to $18,000 depending on location.
So unless the NBRA has several hundred thousand dollars on hand – and a time machine that allows them to go back and make reservations for the billboards before they were all booked – it looks like this is just another self-aggrandizing boast designed to make it seem as if the NBRA has any influence at all.
As anyone who has paid any attention to Jerome Corsi since his emergence on the right-wing scene a few years back knows, he’s little more than a third-tier hack prone to spinning out conspiracy theories with an overblown sense of his own importance.
The folks behind “The Obama Nation,” the wildly successful but factually disputed new book trashing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, are casting it as a scholarly, thoroughly researched work.
But its author has left a trail of wild theories, vitriol and dogma that have called into question his credibility.
Jerome Corsi, who rose to prominence as the co-author of a book attacking 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, penned another tome asserting oil is a nearly infinite resource that continues to generate naturally, and posted a series of online comments through 2004, including suggestions that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian and Muslims worship Satan.
…
Corsi is an unabashed partisan. In 2006, he mulled a run for president under the hard-right Constitution Party’s banner and last year he signed on as a senior strategist for a group that intended to become to the right what MoveOn.org is to the left.
But his outrageous assertions and fringe theories — which include allegations that President Bush worked to eliminate the borders with Mexico and Canada and the assertion that Kerry is a Communist — have hurt his credibility on the right, as well.
Corsi’s co-author on the Kerry attack book, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth spokesman John O'Neill, downplayed Corsi’s role after the left-leaning press watchdog group Media Matters exposed Corsi’s venomous postings in the conservative blogosphere.
On the blog FreeRepublic.com, Corsi wrote that pedophilia “is OK with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press,” that “RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters” and that Kerry is “Anti-Christian, Anti-American.”
Last year, Corsi released a book charging President Bush was secretly plotting to create a North American Union by merging the U.S. with Canada and Mexico.
The Parents Television Council, the right-wing television watchdog group founded by Brent Bozell, is dedicated to “documenting the dramatic increase in sex, violence and profanity in entertainment.” With that as its mission, it was not much of a surprise when they released a new report saying that they don’t like what they see:
Today’s prime-time television programming is not merely indifferent to the institution of marriage and the stabilizing role it plays in our society, it seems to be actively seeking to undermine marriage by consistently painting it in a negative light. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in the treatment of sex on television. Sex in the context of marriage is either non-existent on prime-time broadcast television, or is depicted as a burdensome rather than as an expression of love and commitment. By contrast, extra-marital or adulterous sexual relationships are depicted with greater frequency and overwhelmingly, as a positive experience. Across the broadcast networks, verbal references to non-marital sex outnumbered references to sex in the context of marriage by nearly 3 to 1; and scenes depicting or implying sex between non-married partners outnumbered scenes depicting or implying sex between married partners by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1.
How exactly does the PTC quantify such things, you ask? Good question:
So what has Tom DeLay been up to since leaving office, besides telling Rick Scarborough’s congregation that “America was created by God to spread the Gospel; to spread the word of Jesus Christ and to propagate Christianity,” that is?
"Obama is too radical," he says, calling the presumptive Democratic nominee a "socialist" and a "Marxist." But even if McCain wins, that won't be sufficient for a 1994-style conservative comeback. "Conservatives will have to fight McCain too on issues like immigration, affirmative action, and global warming," DeLay says. He warns that the cap-and-trade policies favored in varying degrees by both Obama and McCain could "destroy our economy."
Since leaving the House, DeLay has been busy raising money for conservative causes, huddling with movement leaders over political strategy, training activists, and rallying true believers to keep the faith. The Coalition for a Conservative Majority now has eight active chapters, with hopes of growing across the entire country. Even more important to DeLay than reclaiming the congressional majority is defending Israel, another area where he has remained active behind the scenes now that he is no longer in office.
..
In many ways DeLay's task may be the hardest, especially given the tools the Hammer has at his disposal. Enforcing party discipline in the House isn't exactly the same as keeping together a fractious group of economic, social, and national-security conservatives who have been demoralized by defeat and are still adapting to Obama after gearing up to fight Hillary. This may include the Coalition for a Conservative Majority, whose website contains more references to Hillary than Obama. The group's chairman, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, was an honorable exception to the Buckeye State GOP's unprincipled big-government drift, but his landslide gubernatorial defeat raises questions about whether he is the man to topple MoveOn.Org.
We’ve written about the National Black Republican Association a few times in the past, mostly to point out that they are a small, fringe group that tries to make a name for itself every election season by doing things like running ridiculous ads about how the "Democratic Party is a racist party.”
Over the weekend, the Sarasota Herald Tribune published a lengthy profile of NBRA Chairman Frances Rice and her antics, which seem to be accomplishing little more than angering and alienating her would-be political allies:
When hearing that the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, Jim Greer, had expressed disappointment in her magazine, The Black Republican, which Greer had secured party money to publish, Rice dismissed it with a wave of her hand.
The magazine featured a picture of Ku Klux Klan members burning a cross, with the caption "Every person in this photograph was a Democrat."
Article titles included "Democrats embrace their child molesters," and "Top 10 Democratic sex scandals in Congress," and "Democrats wage war on God."
…
"Obviously we weren't consulted before she decided to do any of this," said Tony Cooper, president of the Tampa Black Republican Club. "It's a fruitless debate and it may conjure up more ill will toward the party. We should be spending money on debating the Democrats on the issues."
Said Deon Long, president of Florida's Federation of Black Republican Clubs: "We thought those billboards were asinine."
…
Greer, the state party chairman, said the party is no longer donating to the NBRA. While pictures of himself and Gov. Charlie Crist were on the cover of the magazine, along with favorable articles about them, Greer said he had no knowledge of the other content until after the magazine was published.
"Mrs. Rice has some very strong views on certain issues," Greer said. "It showed us that before we donate to anything, regardless of how it appears, the party needs to ensure it takes a look at all the content."
The article notes that Palm Beach County Republican Party donated $20,000 to start the NBRA back in 2005 and, since then, “nearly everyone else originally part of the NBRA … has since dropped out. The original board included eight members from around the country, and Rice's husband. In a matter of months, all the board members except Rice, her husband and Cadogan resigned.” Apparently the final straw came after Rice insisted on sending out a press release praising President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Rice appears to run the organization with an iron fist, accusing those who disagree with her or not a being “a real Republican” and seemingly having a complete disregard for tax laws governing non-profit organizations, with the Tribune reporting that Rice has shuttered NRBA’s 527 and is relying on donations that have come through the NBRA’s non-profit 501c4 arm to engage in what appears to be partisan electoral work despite the fact that “under the IRS code, [501 c4s] are not allowed to help elect candidates or push partisan politics as their primary purpose.”
But Rice seems to have no regrets about her tactics or her role as a fringe, right-wing activist – in fact, she seems to thrive on it:
"This is the first time in my life that I have felt I am actually doing something about what the Democrats have done in the past and are doing now to black people," Rice said. "If the Democrats had left us alone after the Republicans freed us from slavery we wouldn't be having this discussion today. They are keeping blacks in virtual slavery."
Elaine Donnelly blames everyone but herself for her embarrassing performance: "'The follow-up media describing this hearing just continued a very abusive atmosphere. It was not by any means the kind of fair hearing that we had been led to expect,' she contends. 'But that was for two reasons -- the Democrats were determined to shape the hearing into the image that they had in mind. And secondly, the Republicans did not show up.'
According to a statement released by Donnelly Monday afternoon, she and Brian Jones -- a retired sergeant of the Army's Delta Force -- had difficulty being heard 'because liberal members of the committee attacked our motives, asked absurd questions, and tried to bully us in the presence of hostile media.'"
