 | ||||
| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 2 August 2001 | Vol. II, No. 67 | ||
|
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 2 August 2001 | Vol. II, No. 67 | ||
|
| ||||
| ||||
*** Teacher's Pets
*** Secret documents show that the National Education Association has BECOME the Democratic Party.
BY WILLIAM MCGURN
Thursday, August 2, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
Those of us who have long dismissed the National Education Association as a tool of the Democratic Party have been badly mistaken. Apparently it's just the opposite. As documents now sealed under a judge's order indicate, it's the Democratic Party that is the tool of the NEA.
That, at least, is the gist of a report from the Federal Election Commission, all the more tantalizing because the object of its investigation was not the NEA but the AFL-CIO. Yet the NEA's name surfaces again and again as one of those organizations that, in return for financial contributions, were given seats on campaign committees in 1996 as well as the right to approve or reject the Democratic agenda.
This would be riveting enough on its own. But the Landmark Legal Foundation adds a point that puts it in fascinating context: All the while the NEA was sitting on these committees and financing these Democratic campaigns, it was listing zero dollars for political expenditures on its tax forms.
"Imagine the outrage if it emerged that the Republican National Committee had given HMOs and the oil companies a veto over the Republican Party platform in exchange for contributions," says Landmark President Mark Levin. "But here you have the largest union in the country apparently doing it with tax-exempt dollars and then turning around and telling the IRS they're spending nothing on politics."
This integration of the NEA into the Democratic Party goes a long way toward explaining how a monopoly that today leaves nearly two-thirds of African-American and Hispanic fourth-graders illiterate has insulated itself against political accountability. It helps explain too why George W. Bush gutted the key reform of his education package, a tepid voucher provision for failing public schools, understanding as he did that the NEA would never permit Democrats to sign on to it. Thanks to these new documents, we know that this is not simply because the NEA happens to be influential in the Democratic Party. It's because the NEA--with 16,000 local offices--has in some respects become the Democratic Party.
The history of these documents themselves hint at the scandal behind them. Earlier this month, in response to a request from the Democratic National Committee and the AFL-CIO, they were sealed by U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler. Fortunately, Landmark had already snapped them up during an all-too-brief, four-day window back in May, when the FEC had made them public. Had Landmark not grabbed these papers in time, the degree of intimacy between the NEA and the Democratic Party would remain secret.
So what do these FEC documents show? They show that in spite of NEA President Bob Chase's ritual invocations of "bipartisanship," when it comes to political campaigns the NEA has lashed itself firmly to the donkey's tail:
. A response to an FEC subpoena written on the DNC's letterhead confirms that there indeed existed in 1995-96 a "National Coordinated Campaign Steering Committee," which met at DNC headquarters and "normally included" the NEA.
The Clinton/Gore '96 Primary Committee defines this coordinated campaign as "the project of the state parties to register and turn out Democratic voters on behalf of the entire Democratic ticket in the general election."
. In response to another subpoena, a lawyer for Project '95/'96 defined it as a "coalition of labor unions, environmental, senior and public interest organizations" formed in wake of the Republican takeover of the House to stop Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. An FEC analysis stated the Project was funded by "in-kind contributions" from its "participating organizations," among which was the NEA. Activities included dispatching "field organizers" to Republican districts deemed vulnerable to Democratic takeover in the 1996 elections.
. In North Carolina the president of the state NEA, John Wilson, also served on the Democratic committee that handled day-to-day management of the coordinated campaign. The "Coordinated Plan" lays out the quid pro quo: "When the DNC and its national partners, including . . . the NEA, agree on the contents of a plan, each national partner will give their funding commitment to the state."
. In the prelude to an affidavit filed by Joseph Cullen, Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional District, the FEC defined the Coordinated Campaign as "a separate statewide campaign structure within each State Democratic Party, created and financed by Democratic nominees and allied organizations [emphasis added]."
Again, all this emerged in an investigation of the AFL-CIO. What incriminating documents might turn up in an investigation of the NEA itself is anyone's guess.
The NEA continues to maintain its tax form is correct; there have been no political expenditures as defined by the IRS, notwithstanding statements listed in its own budget priorities that smell an awful lot like the kinds of things described in these Democratic answers to FEC subpoenas. To take but one example, the NEA's strategic plan for 2000 budgets $386,000 in members' dues for "organizational partnerships with political parties, campaign committees and political organizations." Mary Elizabeth Teasley, an NEA official who served on the national steering committee, says that language is "misleading." And she says that though she did serve on the national steering committee, the aforementioned reference to a quid pro quo with specified donations is wrong; she was there only for "informational" purposes. And "every dime" the NEA contributed to any campaign was through a political action committee.
Now, the NEA is perfectly entitled to spend money on politics through its PAC. But that would require the union to list any money transferred to its PACs on line 81 of its Form 990. That would be inconvenient for two reasons: First, the money would be taxable. Second, under the Supreme Court's Beck decision, union members have a right a refund of dues money spent for such purposes. In any event, the NEA's PAC is not mentioned in the subpoenaed documents.
The FEC has opted not to pursue the case against the AFL-CIO, despite its conclusion that Democratic campaigns had granted the AFL-CIO and NEA the "authority to approve or disapprove plans, projects, and needs of the DNC and its state parties." The apparent flip-flop stemmed from a judge's decision in a case involving the Christian Coalition, whose ruling interpreted the First Amendment as setting a higher bar for proving illegal "coordination" of campaign activities.
Yet even if the Constitution permits the NEA to run the Democratic Party outright--as I think it does--this ought not to mean the NEA is free to flout laws about the use of tax-exempt dues for political purposes. For years the great lament over American education has been that no one holds teachers accountable for the fact that "Johnny can't read." The evidence of these documents suggests that might have something to do with the New Math the NEA uses on its tax forms.
(Mr. McGurn is The Wall Street Journal's chief editorial writer)
[ GOP N&V ]
The Jerusalem Post reported a comment by Mexico's National Security Adviser Adolfo Aguilar Zinser. The story originated in The San Diego Union-Tribune and should be seriously considered.
"We have evidence that organizations or people linked to Islamic organizations could have a presence here (US border) or be passing through." When pressed on this comment, Zinser would not elaborate, though the Mexican daily El Universal said the Islamic militants trying to form a base of operations in Mexico are tied to the Hezbollah, the Syrian- and Iranian-backed terrorist group.
[ Utah GOP N&V ]
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), who's widely expected to run for president in 2004, raised some eyebrows in the environmental community last week when he skipped a hearing that featured Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman.
While other Democrats attacked the Bush administration's policies at the Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, Lieberman was over at the White House negotiating with Bush on the President's faith-based initiative - which is not exactly a top Democratic priority.
In the view of some environmentalists, the contrast seemed to cement the image of Lieberman as a centrist who might not win the hearts and minds of the left when the '04 primaries come around.
"He's certainly praying for the future of the party, I guess," one top environmental lobbyist quipped of Lieberman's trip to the White House. "It shows where his priorities are."
This lobbyist suggested that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), another presidential aspirant, is already doing a better job of wooing environmentalists.
"Lieberman just doesn't get us excited," said the lobbyist. "When you have someone like Kerry, why do you need Lieberman?"
While Lieberman spokesman Dan Gerstein acknowledged that the boss had been tied up at the White House, he sharply disputed any contention that the Senator is weak on the environment.
Noting that Lieberman is the chairman of the EPA subcommittee on clean air and is headed for Kyoto and Buenos Aires to press the case for reducing global warming, Gerstein said that environmentalists "know his record and know that one of his top priorities and real passions is environmental protection.
"It's a record Senator Lieberman is very proud of," added Gerstein. "He's dedicated to cleaner air and a safer environment."
[ Roll Call ]
** Widow Of Deceased Senate Candidate Went To Senate
** Her Husband's Challenger, John Ashcroft, Became Attorney General
** Now A Top Missouri Republican Will Run Against Her
Former Republican Rep. Jim Talent plans to challenge Democrat Sen. Jean Carnahan next year for the seat she was appointed to after her husband was killed in a plane crash.
Talent was to issue a statement Thursday from his St. Louis office announcing his plans to run, a Missouri Republican familiar with his decision said Wednesday.
Talent is forming an exploratory fund-raising committee in preparation for declaring himself a candidate, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Talent, 44, narrowly lost last year's race for Missouri governor.
Rich Chrismer, a spokesman for Talent, would not comment, saying only: "Jim is going to make a statement tomorrow morning regarding his future plans."
Mrs. Carnahan, 67, holds the Senate seat won posthumously last year by Gov. Mel Carnahan. She must run next year if she wants to complete the six-year term.
Though she has not made her candidacy official, Mrs. Carnahan has raised more than $2.3 million for the race, according to reports filed this week with the Federal Election Commission. As of June 30, she reported nearly $1.8 million in cash on hand.
Carnahan died in a plane crash three weeks before the Nov. 7 election. His name could not be removed from the ballot and he defeated John Ashcroft, the Republican incumbent, by more than 48,000 votes.
Mrs. Carnahan was appointed to serve until the next general election, in 2002.
[ AP ]
Jimmy "Malaise" Carter surprised even his fellow Democrats recently with an unprecedented attack on a president by a former president. Today, Carter tried to explain.
Among Carter's recent comments about President Bush, published by the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer: "I have been disappointed in almost everything he has done. ... I thought he would be a moderate leader, but he has been very strictly conforming to some of the more conservative members of his administration, his vice president and his secretary of defense in particular. More moderate people like Colin Powell have been frozen out of the basic decision-making in dealing with international affairs."
The comments were not only dirty pool, they also belied Carter's image as a nice old bungler and exposed him as just another mean-spirited Democrat in the mold of Sens. Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, ad nauseam, and Reps. Dick Gephardt, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, ad nauseam.
The most fitting response to Carter's attack was the priceless commentary from Fox News' John Gibson, who recalled Carter's disastrous one-term presidency complete with high unemployment, inflation, long gasoline lines (which Bush's anti-energy critics would love to repeat) and failure to get the hostages back from Iran.
Carter told CNN today that he did not give the interview to the Columbus paper.
"I gave the interview to a Bangladesh professor who claimed to be writing a book about me who now teaches in Houston, and my understanding of the interview was that the interview was an hour and half long that covered multitudes of issues, would be published at a time his book came out," said Carter, displaying his trademark confusion and incompetence.
"But I have to say that all the quotes were accurate. The problem is that they just selected a few of the negative things I said about President Bush, didn't put in the positive things."
And here's what Jimmy "Ethnic Purity" Carter had to say in the Rose Garden today when presenting his report on election "reform": "It's a pleasure to come back and be with my friend George W. Bush."
[ NewsMax ]
A battle over cattle grazing in Nevada's high desert is pitting lawman against lawman.
When federal officers seized the herds of two local ranchers from government land last week, only a stern warning from the U.S. attorney stopped a pair of county sheriffs from blocking the roundup.
Now, dozens of ranchers and states-rights activists are holding protests at the livestock yard where the captured cattle are being kept, a sheriff is pressing a legal offensive against future seizures and local authorities are complaining that heavy-handed federal rules are threatening a traditional way of life in the West.
``They intimidate and hope they can get away with it,'' said Lt. Tony Philips of the Nye County sheriff's office.
The dispute is the latest feud between local and federal law enforcement as New West range wars create alliances and enemies John Wayne never would have dreamed of. Recent examples:
- San Bernardino County, Calif., Sheriff Gary Penrod canceled an agreement that gave U.S. Bureau of Land Management officers the ability to enforce state laws on federal land. County ranchers are chafing at grazing restrictions imposed to protect the threatened desert tortoise. Penrod said he didn't want to be associated with ``law enforcement personnel who may be precipitating violent range disputes.'' -
-The sheriff in Sevier County, Utah, has allowed ranchers to take back cattle that were seized by the BLM after ranchers refused to take them off drought-denuded range in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Sheriff Phil Barney said he wanted to avoid a ``Waco situation'' last November.
-In Klamath Falls, Ore., Sheriff Tim Evinger has mediated a tense dispute between farmers and the Bureau of Reclamation, which cut off irrigation water because of shortages brought on by drought and complicated by environmental rules.
-Last year, residents in northeast Nevada defied a different federal agency, the Forest Service, by taking shovels to rebuild a washed-out stretch of road in Elko County. The Forest Service had ruled that construction would threaten the bull trout. After months of confrontation, uneasy negotiations on a compromise are under way.
In Fallon, BLM officials are holding nearly 200 cattle owned by Ben Colvin and John Vogt, saying they owe a combined $370,000 in fees and fines for grazing without permits since 1995. The agency said the ranchers are overgrazing tens of thousands of acres in Nye and Esmeralda counties, 150 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Nevada, with its vast expanses of desert and wind-swept range, is 87 percent owned by the federal government.
It was the birthplace of the Sagebrush Rebellion against federal land policy in the 1980s, and the Elko road dispute has energized a new round of anti-Washington activism. Ranchers and their increasingly vocal supporters see themselves as victims of rules that put environmental concerns above people.
``I don't think they have the right to take my cattle,'' said Colvin, 63, whose family has been in the ranching business since 1860. ``They may have the power but they don't have the right.''
[ AP ]
Janet Reno would swamp all her opponents in a primary fight for the Democrat gubernatorial nomination but would lose big to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the general election, says a new poll.
Confirming NewsMax.com's article Monday that predicted the same kind of outcome, a poll in Thursday's Miami Herald shows Reno would win big in a six-way Democrat primary race, getting a whopping 47 percent of the vote, and then lose to Jeb Bush with a mere 39 percent of the statewide vote.
The Mason-Dixon Florida poll of 625 registered voters had even more bad news for the former Clinton administration attorney general: Only 7 percent of those polled were undecided - an indication that voters have already made up their minds about keeping Bush in the Governor's mansion in Tallahassee.
On Monday NewsMax reported that thanks to her huge advantage in name recognition, Reno would easily beat any of the reported Democrat gubernatorial hopefuls, but added that because of her large number of negatives she would face almost certain defeat in a race against Bush.
Even worse for Reno was the fact that the poll showed that more Floridians disliked her - 37 percent - than liked her - 32 percent.
Moreover, Reno could expect that Bush, in a Bush/Reno race, could attract 26 percent of the Democrat voters to his side and a huge 57 percent of the state's independent voters as well.
Reno, however, could win a measly 8 percent of the GOP vote and would go down to humiliating defeat in conservative northern Florida, getting only to 28 percent of the vote to Bush's 64 percent.
``All the numbers suggest she'd pull the core Democrats, but not the swing voters a Democrat needs to win in Florida,'' pollster Brad Coker told the Herald. ``You need to not get killed in North Florida, and the numbers don't suggest she has the potential to do that.
``If you bring in Reno, you bring in some positive things like name recognition, but she has baggage that no one else has,'' Coker said.
What was bad news for Reno, however, was better news for Democrats reported to be thinking about throwing their hats in the ring. In races against former Rep. Pete Peterson and Rep. Jim Davis, Bush's margin drops to just below 50 percent. The number of undecided voters triples to almost 20 percent.
``That 15 points Bush has over Reno is much more formidable than the 16 to 18 that he has over Davis and Peterson because they are unknown to over half of the voters,'' Coker told the Herald. ``She's already been defined, but the potential is there for Peterson or Davis to close into single digits if they can up their name recognition. If I were a strategist for either candidate, I would tell them this is a doable race.
``No one's going to ask Pete Peterson about Waco; no one's going to ask Jim Davis about appointing special prosecutors,'' Coker said.
Neither state House minority leader Lois Frankel - an announced candidate - nor potential candidates Sen. Daryl Jones of Miami and Tampa attorney Bill McBride fared well against Gov. Bush, who stays above the magical 50 percent of the vote against any of the three.
Reno told the Herald that the new poll confirmed the conventional wisdom she would win the primary and have a rough row to hoe in the general election.
``I've always said this would be a very challenging race,'' she said. ``But it doesn't mean anyone isn't going to have a hard race."
Bush campaign manager Karen Unger told the Herald that the poll was an indication of the governor's strong popularity ratings - ``particularly given the barrage of attacks leveled by the Democrats and covered almost daily by the media.''
*** Does support for marriage equal support for domestic violence?
Minnesota Democratic U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone lashed out at pro-marriage policies, recently, as he tore into Dr. Wade Horn, President Bush's nominee for a post in the Health and Human Services Department (HHS).
During Horn's confirmation hearings, Wellstone denounced policies that encourage marriage among the poor as engendering violence.
"For these women and their children the cost of freedom and safety has been poverty," he said. "And marriage is not the solution to their economic insecurity."
Surprisingly, Wellstone expressed the belief that marriage can actually be bad for society.
"For some of these women, marriage could even mean death," Wellstone said.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., defended Horn.
"Dr. Horn would never and has never advocated that anyone stay in an abusive marriage. And no one believes this despite inferences to the contrary on the Senate floor."
Focus on the Family Marriage and Family Analyst Amy Desai says the research shows that Wellstone has it backwards.
"People who are married are far less likely to experience domestic violence than any other relationship." She says encouraging couples to marry is not the problem, it's the solution.
"It helps poor people climb out of poverty," Desai said. "We know that married people earn more, they're healthier, physically and emotionally, they're more sexually satisfied, and they're happier."
Desai says the welfare system currently discourages people from getting married and needs to be changed.
Horn was easily confirmed as the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Family Support.
Prior to his new position, Dr. Horn served as president of the National Fatherhood Initiative. He has been an outspoken advocate for responsible fatherhood as well as lobbying for policies that bolster marriage. His defenders spanned both political parties.
[ CitizenLink ]
The homepage and archives for The Conservative Newsletter are located on the WWW at http://www.wilderness-cry.net/tcn/
This newsletter is sent by subscription only. If you do not wish to be on the mailing list, please let us know and you will be removed immediately. To be removed from this mailing list, simply reply to this newsletter with the word REMOVE in the body of your reply. You may also send your request to tcn@wilderness-cry.net .
Thank you.