« Elections
June 13, 2008
Donohue: Candidates Should "Respect Churches"
Catholic League President Bill Donohue seizes the opportunity to respond to a survey that indicates 57% of Americans believe religious leaders should not support political candidates from the pulpit: “Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama should set an example by pledging never to attend a church service that is a front for a political rally. Too often, clergy have abused their office by making veiled endorsements—and in some cases explicit endorsements—of candidates for public office at a church service. Just as bad has been the practice of the candidates themselves making a pitch to the congregation from the pulpit.” Never one to inappropriately mix religion and politics, Donohue tends to simply accuse political opponents of anti-Catholic bias.
Posted by Chris at 3:49 PM | Permalink
May 9, 2008
The Right Prepares to Challenge the IRS
It is no secret that, heading into the 2008 election, the Republican Party’s right-wing base is anything but energized about having to vote for John McCain. Facing dim prospects, the McCain campaign is doing what it can to court the Right, as is the RNC, while Religious Right power-brokers are working overtime to get pastors involved all over the country.
For instance, a few weeks ago, Kenyn Cureton, the Family Research Council’s Vice President for Church Ministries, appeared on Janet Folger’s “Faith2Action” radio program where he revealed their plans to encourage pastors to speak out leading up to the election and, in his words, “cross the line”:
“The pastors need to speak clearly about it. I’ll tell you we are working with the Alliance Defense Fund on a series of sermons this fall for pastors to preach, so that they educate their people on the issues.
“We’re gonna be talking about the value of life, the value of family and the value of freedom, basically talking about abortion and stem-cell research,” he continued, “and then also about the gay agenda and then finally about our Christian heritage and how it’s being stripped from every corner of society. And then finally we’re gonna be doing a candidate comparison message that is going to ask pastors to cross the line.”
At the time, it wasn’t know exactly what FRC and the Alliance Defense Fund were planning, but today the ADF revealed that it intends to find preachers who are willing to defy the current tax laws and openly challenge the IRS:
A conservative legal-advocacy group is enlisting ministers to use their pulpits to preach about election candidates this September, defying a tax law that bars churches from engaging in politics.
Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz., nonprofit, is hoping at least one sermon will prompt the Internal Revenue Service to investigate, sparking a court battle that could get the tax provision declared unconstitutional. Alliance lawyers represent churches in disputes with the IRS over alleged partisan activity.
The action marks the latest attempt by a conservative organization to help clergy harness their congregations to sway elections. The protest is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 28, a little more than a month before the general election, in a year when religious concerns and preachers have been a regular part of the political debate.
As Americans United’s Rob Boston put it, “If a few misguided churches want to become cogs in a political machine, they can simply give up their tax exemptions and play by the same tax and election-law rules as everybody else.” But the Right refuses to do that and has decided, instead, to challenge the constitutionality of the law in the court.
And given the current make-up of the Supreme Court and the likelihood that the next president will be placing one or more justices on the Court, it is quite possible that the outcome of this right-wing legal challenge, should it make it to the high court, will rest heavily on the outcome of the very election they are seeking to influence.
Posted by Kyle at 4:22 PM | Permalink
January 18, 2007
McCain’s Appeasement of the Right Continues
Having already made nice with Jerry Falwell after having once labeled him an “agent of intolerance,” and fresh on the heels of his offer to meet with James Dobson after Dobson declared that he would not support his presidential bid “under any circumstances,” John McCain appears to be doing all that he can to win over the Right.
For instance, it was recently announced that McCain has secured the endorsement of a Christian talk-show host in Iowa:
Maxine Sieleman praised Mr. McCain for his "consistent record supporting pro-life, pro-family legislation" and his commitment to appointing "strict constructionist judges."
Ms. Sieleman is the founder of the Iowa chapter of Concerned Women for America, which advocates bringing "biblical principles" to public policy. She has also hosted a show on a Christian radio station in Des Moines since 1982.
In an apparent attempt to further establish his right-wing credentials, McCain has done a blatant about-face and announced that he will oppose a lobbying reform bill he once supported:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has told conservative activists that he will vote to strip a key provision on grassroots lobbying from the reform package he previously supported.
…
While grassroots groups on both sides of the political spectrum oppose the proposal, social conservative leaders such as Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, who broadcasts a radio program to hundreds of thousands of evangelical Christians, have been its most vehement critics.
McCain sponsored legislation last Congress that included an even broader requirement for grassroots lobbying coalitions to reveal their financial donors. But now he will vote to defeat a similar measure.
Posted by Kyle at 4:17 PM | Permalink
January 17, 2007
Praise From An Expert on Lost Causes
It looks as if Rep. Tom Tancredo is hoping to capitalize on his anti-immigrant credentials in an effort to make a run for the White House:
Rep. Tom Tancredo yesterday formed a committee to explore a run for the Republican nomination for president, hoping to force the issue of immigration into the primary debates and push the candidates to embrace stricter enforcement.
"As I look at the current presidential candidates -- Republican and Democratic -- I simply do not see one who reflects the grass-roots, majority belief of Americans that our borders must be secured, that employers who hire illegals must be prosecuted, and that no one who has broken our immigration laws should ever be put on a 'pathway to citizenship,' " Mr. Tancredo wrote in his first fundraising letter.
It is hard to believe that Tancredo has much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination – and the fact that his campaign is winning accolades from Bay Buchanan does not bode well:
Bay Buchanan, a friend and confidante of Mr. Tancredo's who runs his political action committee, Team America, said that immigration is the issue that will help Mr. Tancredo stand out from the pack of candidates. She also said his record, consistently conservative up and down the line, will go over well with Iowa's pro-life, conservative caucusgoers.
"He is an across-the-board social conservative -- one that the Christian right can feel completely comfortable with, that he has been with them on those issues for his whole life," she said.
…
But Mr. Tancredo stands out from that pack because he brings to the race a dedicated army of talk-radio show hosts and activists who oppose illegal immigration.
"His strength is that he already has a national following. He has enormous grass-roots support. He is well-known across this country by the Republican base," said Mrs. Buchanan, who was chairman in all three of her brother Pat Buchanan's presidential campaigns.
Having thrice chaired her brother’s various losing efforts, Buchanan clearly has an affinity backing futile vanity campaigns, so it comes as no surprise that she’s supporting Tancredo.
Posted by Kyle at 5:02 PM | Permalink
January 8, 2007
Heritage Foundation Pushes 'Charter-State Option'
In two op-eds and an event with Sens. Cornyn and DeMint.
Posted by Ezra at 6:01 PM | Permalink
January 5, 2007
Creationist Toppled Incumbent in SW Ohio School Board Race
Aims to teach “intelligent design.”
Posted by Ezra at 6:19 PM | Permalink
Strangely, Right-Wing Media Watchdog Doesn't Blame Media for George Allen Loss
Instead, AIM’s Kincaid suggests “sabotage” by supposed gay staffers.
Posted by Ezra at 6:16 PM | Permalink
York Misstates the Facts
Writing in The National Review, Byron York has penned an article entitled “The Loser Who Won’t Concede” in which he dismisses the massive undervote of more than 18,000 ballots in Florida’s 13th Congressional District during the November election [CNN ran a segment about it yesterday.]
The People For the American Way Foundation has been very active in seeking a remedy for this disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, and thus knows a bit more about it than York seems to. For instance, York claims:
[T]here was no evidence anything had gone wrong with the machines. As the wrangling went on, a group of three political scientists — James Honaker and Jeffrey Lewis of UCLA and Michael Herron of Dartmouth — began to look into the matter. They found no evidence of machine malfunction, either, and instead argued that the problem was most likely a confusing ballot design in Sarasota County’s machines.
This is actually not the case. In the report that Herron et al. published, they explicitly state that "we cannot directly address engineering issues here" and "we cannot definitively rule out the possibility that there was some voting machine malfunction in the sense that Sarasota County's touchscreen machines failed to record and tabulate actual screen touches ... because this paper presents a statistical analysis of vote patterns and not a physical examination of voting machines, we cannot completely rule out voting machine malfunction as a source of the Sarasota undervote."
Herron et al. stated that they believed that the ballot format design was to blame, but York's writing is irresponsible in suggesting that they "found no evidence" of machine malfunction. For one thing, Herron is not a computer scientist and didn’t examine the machines for error since he was engaged in a purely statistical analysis of the undervotes. Indeed, when he testified recently as an expert for the voting machine vendor (Election Systems and Software) at an evidentiary hearing in the Florida lawsuits brought by voters and one of the candidates to contest the election, he specifically acknowledged that he had no expertise in the computer software programming for the voting machines used in Sarasota County.
Despite York’s assertion that there was “no evidence of machine malfunction,” PFAWF found many potentially disenfranchised voters who claim otherwise.
With the 110th Congress now in session and the “winner” of the 13th Congressional District race being provisionally sworn-in, it is imperative that a full investigation be conducted in order to ensure that voters of Florida’s 13th Congressional District are represented by the candidate they intended to elect.
Posted by Kyle at 9:27 AM | Permalink
December 22, 2006
Tom Delay: Actually Reading the Law is for Wimps
In a post on his ghostwritten (but apparently not fact checked) blog, former somebody Tom Delay took aim at People For the American Way Foundation and the ACLU, who along with Voter Action and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are representing Sarasota County voters suing for a revote in Florida's 13th congressional district race in which more than 18,000 voters were disenfranchised in a contest decided by fewer than 400 votes.
[Democratic Congressional Candidate Christine] Jennings, for her part, is filing an official election challenge with the House Administration Committee, and she and leftwing advocacy groups such as People for the American Way and the ACLU have already launched a lawsuit in Florida, asking Leon County (Tallahassee) Circuit Judge William Gary to negate the November 7th results and order a new election. The suit was filed in Tallahasse, hundreds of miles from the 13th district, in hopes of getting a more liberal judge and jury pool instead of Sarasota County where the election actually occurred and the voting machines in question are located.
Of course, had Delay paid attention to the law, he would have known state law requires that an election contest like this, where the election encompassed more than one county, must be filed in state court in Leon County (Tallahassee). Oh, and it’s not a jury trial either.
It’s nice to nice to see Tom Delay is maintaining the high standards of honesty and integrity that gave him the opportunity to be a blogger rather than a member of Congress.
Posted by Drew at 2:54 PM | Permalink
December 11, 2006
Home School PAC Mobilizes Kids for Republican Candidates
Making 400,000 phone calls and knocking on 100,000 doors, according to Washington Times.
Posted by Ezra at 11:59 PM | Permalink
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