otis, maureen
<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">off bs</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Maureen E. Otis, Esquire – President</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A former Certified Public Accountant and an attorney, is a nationally recognized non-profit law expert. Maureen has served as a member of the faculty for the Association of Fundraising Professionals (formerly NSFRE) International Conferences. Her law firm, Law Offices of Maureen E. Otis, P.C., represents non-profit organizations, professional fundraisers and fund raising consultants in their efforts to comply with state charitable solicitation laws.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> <span style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Home</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Company Overview</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Executive Team</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In addition to overseeing the operations of American Caging, Maureen is responsible for managing our Escrow and Accounting department and coordinating client relationships with various depository banks.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><div style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">American Caging</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> has been serving the needs of the fundraising community since 1990. We specialize in providing caging, escrow and accounting, fulfillment, data entry, and </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">file maintenance services to non-profit organizations, their telemarketers and direct response agencies.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We recognize that to meet the needs of our clients, we must adapt ourselves to the systems and protocols of our clients, and not the other way around. By remaining flexible and offering a variety of services, we can meet the needs of our diverse client base.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Services Include:</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Cash Processing</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Check Processing Including Encoding</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Credit Card Processing</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Processing Political Gifts Per FEC Requirements</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Detailed Electronic And Manual Reporting</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Data Entry</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Data analysis and Reporting</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Data Donor File Maintenance</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Database Management</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Fulfillment</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Acknowledgement Letters</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Escrow & Accounting</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Post Office Box Management</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Legal Compliance</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">State<b> Charitable Solicitation Registration</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style=""><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Charitable Organizations</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Exempt under IRC Section <b>501 C 3 </b>– including Religious Organizations and Churches</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Other Non-profit Organizations</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Advocacy Groups</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Veteran Organizations</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Healthcare Institutions</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Public Safety Organizations</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Research Foundations</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trade Associations</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Political Candidates and PAC's</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Direct Response Agencies [this must be direct junk mail]</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Telemarketing Companies</div></div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><a href="https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/gary-johnson-swindle/">https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/gary-johnson-swindle/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">very long</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">
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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The first interesting thing about Gary Johnson is that he decided to set up his campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, just a few blocks away from the HQ of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. That’s where Gary Johnson’s main Super PAC is located as well.</b> Gary Johnson isn’t Mormon.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Salt Lake City Tribune also thought it was a little weird, so they asked about it in a story headlined<a href="http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=17232915&itype=storyID" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">"Ex-New Mexico guv bases his presidential campaign in — Utah?"</a> which begins:</font></p><blockquote img="img" chrome="chrome" bq-bottom-right.png="bq-bottom-right.png" url="url" bq-bottom-left.png="bq-bottom-left.png" bq-top-right.png="bq-top-right.png" bq-top-left.png="bq-top-left.png" background-position="background-position" right="right" bottom="bottom" left="left" top="top" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" color="color" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 25px 29px; background-image: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Republican presidential candidate has landed his national campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City, just a couple of blocks from the Utah governor's mansion. But it's not the White House contender you might think it is.</font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;" /><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It turns out there’s a simple answer: Gary Johnson’s campaign chief, Ron Nielson, is based here. Ron Nielson runs a conservative polling firm called NSON Opinion Strategies, whose headquarters is the same three-story building on South Temple Road as Johnson’s campaign headquarters, and the same address as Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" nonprofit, which launched his bid for the presidency in late 2009.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Unfortunately, the SLT didn’t pry any further, because this is where things start to get interesting. For one thing, NSOM has a history of working with GOP right-wingers including crotchety Mormon asshole <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/david-catanese/2012/04/super-pac-poll-hatch-under-119794.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Orin Hatch</a> and ex-witch and masturbation-denier <a href="http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2010/09/tea_party_expre_2.php" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Christine O’Donnell</a>, as well as the <a href="http://reason.com/assets/db/1327339633235.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Koch’s 'Reason' magazine.</a> They also worked on a smear campaign against Harry Reid in the run up to the 2010 election, but I’ll get to that later.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The point here is that Gary Johnson’s campaign headquarters is located in Romney’s backyard, in a right-wing Republican polling firm’s office. Gary says he likes transparency and believes he should wear his backers’ labels on his jacket like a NASCAR driver. Let me help him into his coat....</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">According to </span><a href="http://wordcab.blogspot.com/2011/04/gov-gary-johnsons-documents-reveal.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">documents</a><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);"> filed with the state of Utah, the person responsible for filing the paperwork to register Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" is</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> <b>Maureen Otis</b>, a Texas attorney with deep roots in the far-right Minutemen movement, and with Republican Party voter-suppression dirty tricks.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);"> Otis’s Texas law office is listed as the mailing address for Johnson’s "Our America Initiative."</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maureen Otis has a long history with far-right anti-immigration vigilante groups. Just a few years ago, Otis served as board secretary for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which the <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2007/spring/shoot-shovel-shut-up/the-groups-a-lis" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Southern Poverty Law Center</a> described as a "nativist extremist" group that "targets individual immigrants rather than immigration policies." That Minuteman outfit collapsed after donation funds went missing, much of it paid to <b>Maureen Otis’s own private company, "American Caging," a company that specializes in <a href="http://www.americancaging.com/services.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">"caging</a> as the name implies.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Caging" was used by Bush operatives to suppress the minority vote in 2000 and 2004. Slate offered <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2007/05/raging_caging.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">this definition of vote "caging"</a>:</font></p><blockquote img="img" chrome="chrome" bq-bottom-right.png="bq-bottom-right.png" url="url" bq-bottom-left.png="bq-bottom-left.png" bq-top-right.png="bq-top-right.png" bq-top-left.png="bq-top-left.png" background-position="background-position" right="right" bottom="bottom" left="left" top="top" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" color="color" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 25px 29px; background-image: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren't living at (because they are, say, at college or at war)."</font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Maureen Otis’ clients for American Caging included nonprofits set up for Alan Keyes, a fundraiser for Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Alliance, and other assorted homophobic Christian groups.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So what does the attorney who registered Gary Johnson’s "Our America" outfit really believe, the libertarian end of the Republican spectrum that Johnson represents, or the reactionary extremism of the Minutemen and Christian homophobes she serves?</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maureen Otis answered that question herself on her own twitter feed, such as <a href="https://twitter.com/motislaw/status/210198612406304769" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">this June 5 tweet</a> following<b> Scott Walker’s win in the Wisconsin recall:</b></font></p><blockquote img="img" chrome="chrome" bq-bottom-right.png="bq-bottom-right.png" url="url" bq-bottom-left.png="bq-bottom-left.png" bq-top-right.png="bq-top-right.png" bq-top-left.png="bq-top-left.png" background-position="background-position" right="right" bottom="bottom" left="left" top="top" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" color="color" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 25px 29px; background-image: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Great news for WI & start of an important trend for Repub's in the fall. Time for everyone to $$ to Romney campaign."</font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Maureen Otis were the only hard-right operative involved in Gary Johnson’s campaign, her confused allegiances might just seem odd. But as you’ll see, extremist right-wing operatives like Otis are all around Gary Johnson, beginning with the "Our America Initiative" nonprofit that launched his campaign.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">The lawyer who incorporated the "Our America Initiative" charter documents, an A-list GOP dirty tricks operative from Orange County named </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Jim Lacy,</b> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">also worked with and supported the same Minutemen outfits as Maureen Otis. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Like her, Jim Lacy also operates a bland-sounding direct-mail business called "slate mail" that targets Democratic voters with mailers purporting to come from fake liberal groups with names like "The John F. Kennedy Alliance" with a soothing photo of JFK on one side, and a slate of supposedly "Democratic" candidates on the other side. In reality, Republican candidates pay to have their names and faces secretly mixed in with the liberal candidates whose names and faces appear to give it a semblance of authenticity. Lacy’s slate order business is, he claims, the largest in the state of California, if not the entire country, and it wreaked so much havoc on California local elections that even Orange County residents revolted with a ballot requiring slate mailers disclose. Lacy fought to have the courts void the will of Orange County’s voters, and the courts agreed, saying that putting restrictions on how badly Lacy could deceive voters violated his First Amendment rights and constituted a form of tyranny.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So both lawyers whose names are on Gary Johnson’s main campaign group since 2009 are not only associated with right-wing extremists and violent nativist vigilantes, but more importantly, both of them specialize in fraudulent vote schemes that help their Republican Party clients win elections by deceiving Democratic Party voters.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">Lacy has been poisoning American politics since his radical-right college years when he was national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom</b><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">. In recent years, Lacy has been a major backer of anti-immigrant Minutemen groups, Islamophobia, and "birther" conspiracy-theory outfits smearing Obama as a foreign-born Muslim.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lacy co-founded a handful of far-right immigrant-bashing outfits with "Birther" leader Gary Kreep, Orly Taitz’s creepier half in joint lawsuits filed to "expose" Obama’s birth certificate as a fake. Both Kreep and Jim Lacy have provided legal help to Minutemen groups in San Diego, when they were at their violent peak terrorizing homeless illegal migrant workers and vandalizing their shanties.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">This summer, Jim Lacy opened up his <a href="http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2012/07/gary_kreep_judge_race_birther.php" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">bag of dirty tricks</a> to get Gary Kreep get elected Superior Court judge.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> How he did it is instructive: On the eve of the San Diego vote, a Lacy outfit bombarded Latinos and Democrats with robocalls claiming that the sitting judge had been releasing drug dealers into their neighborhoods. Kreep won by just over 1,000 votes, and now they might have to someday face a judge who <a href="http://usjf.net/about-2/about-executive-director-gary-kreep/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">boasts</a> of his pro bono work for the Minutemen.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Gary Kreep is just a warm-up act<b>. Jim Lacy’s much more serious partner in political dirty tricks operations over the past two decades is Citizen United’s co-founder Floyd Brown,</b> a Republican Sasquatch who gets a lot of credit for the notorious Willie Horton race-baiting ads in 1988, designed to scare whites into believing Dukakis would empty out the prisons on weekends and allow black inmates to rape and rob white women. The ad worked.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As soon as Obama’s candidacy surged ahead of Hillary in 2008, Lacy and Brown unleashed a barrage of birther-propaganda, and they haven’t let up yet.<b> Their National Campaign Fund outfit produced some of the first "birther" conspiracy commercials,</b> including <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbsihrdn-_s&e" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">"Was He Muslim?".</a> Just days after Obama’s inauguration, Lacy and Brown were running a new campaign, ImpeachObama.com already comparing his first week in office to Hitler and Stalin’s rule.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And here is where the Gary Johnson third party Libertarian campaign begins to cross paths with these Republican dirty tricksters<b>. As the first stimulus bill was being debated, Lacy and Brown announced another smear project, <a href="http://www.exposeharry.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">ExposeHarry.com</a></b>, aimed at weakening Nevada Sen. Harry Reid’s support and turning voters against him in time for the 2010 elections. To understand where Harry Reid was most vulnerable, they hired a Republican polling firm out of Salt Lake City. That polling firm, NSON Opinion Research, is the same polling outfit whose offices serve as Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party presidential campaign headquarters, and whose founder, Ron Nielson, is Gary Johnson’s campaign chief.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ron Nielson later helped create Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" to launch the start of his campaign for 2012. This nonprofit was incorporated by GOP dirty trickster <b>Jim Lacy, and is represented by far-right activist, "voter caging" specialist and Mitt Romney booster Maureen Otis.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It might seem strange to see so many nasty, hard-right dirty tricksters running Johnson’s "principled" campaign, but the notion that Johnson is in any way "liberal" or a friend of progressives is nonsense. Johnson’s liberal creds begin and end with one plank of his platform: legalizing pot.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Johnson’s actual record as governor of New Mexico was that of a law and order authoritarian, on the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party.<b> Johnson ran on a “law and order” platform, stiffening prison sentences (while recklessly <a href="http://lubbockonline.com/stories/090299/reg_0902990098.shtml" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">privatizing the prisons</a>), along with a broader program of slashing taxes, slashing social programs, and privatizing schools. He was divisive, and his law and order policies led to some of the worst prison violence in decades.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It wasn’t until after Gary Johnson won his second term and final term as New Mexico’s governor, and turned his attention to the national stage, that he had his big epiphany about locking up marijuana smokers. Johnson’s about-face on locking up drug offenders sounded brave and newsworthy to outsiders who didn’t know his record — wow! a pot-friendly Republican governor, how cool! Johnson wanted to make the jump to the national stage, and what easier way than adopting the one popular plank in the Koch brothers’ libertarian political platform, legalizing pot, to make journalists and the public forget about all the grim libertarian policies he’d not only talked about but implemented..</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">..</font></p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">Which brings me to the final figure in this sordid GOP dirty tricks operation using Gary Johnson as the "patsy":<b> Joe Hunter,</b> the thin, salt-and-pepper bearded energy stick who stuck close to Gary Johnson that night in Chicago.</p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">It turns out that Joe Hunter is a longtime GOP communications strategist who got his start with a Missouri Republican who represented Rush Limbaugh’s home district,<b> later moving to the Bush-Quayle team where folks like Roger Stone, Jim Lacy and Floyd Brown were busy cooking up smears</b>, while his former boss, the Missouri Republican Bill Emerson, checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic.</p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">In 2000, we find Joe Hunter engaged in the same far-right politics of immigrant bashing and race-baiting as the rest of Johnson’s campaign team. Hunter was the official spokesman for an outfit called "Utahns For Official English". Like other immigrant-bashing groups of that time, Utahns for Official English pushed for laws making English the only official language in the Deseret Kingdom (meaning all those "reformed Egyptian"-inscribed gold plates would have to go).</p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"Utahs For Official English" was set up by a DC-based immigrant-baiting outfit called simply <a href="http://www.us-english.org/" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(58, 135, 173);">"U.S. English"</a> , an outfit that claimed at first to be a progressive project founded by a purported Green Party activist named John Tanton</span><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">, who claimed his interest in pushing English-language laws was for the sake of the immigrants with whom he sympathized. Then some of Tanton’s private memos were leaked, revealing a deranged mind obsessed with racial eugenics and the "fertility" of dark-skinned races versus the relative infertility of the superior white races. Tanton was out to save and protect his beloved white race from contamination — sparking mass resignations from public figures tricked into believing they were serving a progressive Green Party agenda meant to help, not hurt, immigrants. Joe Hunter’s U.S. English headquarters got in trouble for hiring another white supremacist, James Lubinskas, as their communications director, until the </span><a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/fall/mainstreaming-extremism" style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(58, 135, 173);">Southern Poverty Law Center</a><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);"> outed Lubinskas as a longtime activist moving in the same circles as David Duke, and a former contributing editor at the racial eugenics fanzine "American Renaissance."</span></p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After getting his English-only law passed, Joe Hunter was hired as the new chief of staff for Utah Republican Rep. Chris Cannon — one of the leaders of the Clinton impeachment — replacing Cannon’s outgoing chief-of-staff, David Safavian.</span></p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">Shortly afterwards, Safavian’s name came up as a central figure in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal. Safavian was arrested and sentenced to prison. But Chris Cannon managed to hold on to his seat until 2008, thanks to a lot of help from George W. Bush, and to the Mormon church, which made the unusual step of openly calling for Mormons in Utah to vote in the 2006 primaries, effectively defeating Chris Cannon’s rightwing primary opponent.</p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">In 2008, Joe Hunter’s boss lost in the primaries to Jason Chaffetz. No one could help Chris Cannon’s political career anymore. But before leaving, just days before the 2008 election, Chris Cannon hatched a smear rumor against President Obama: He and his brother-in-law, a Utah Republican, paid a British professor who specialized in literary frauds to claim that Obama’s memoir was ghost-written by Bill Ayers. The rumors spread like wildfire around the media, and came right back into Joe Hunter’s boss’s office as the source, shaming Chris Cannon one last time.</p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">That’s who Gary Johnson’s campaign spokesman worked for. These are the ingredients in the "Perrier" Gary Johnson calls his politics, as opposed to the "Coke-Pepsi" of the Republican-Democrats.</p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">In other words, Gary Johnson is part of the fucking problem, and in many ways worse — he’s there to make sure you understand we have no way out of this dead-end trap. And so, to recap:</p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">Gary Johnson’s campaign for the presidency to shake up the corrupt two-party system and introduce a new kind of politics outside the old paradigm of left and right, was:</p><ul style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: none; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);"><li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Managed by a Republican/Koch pollster who partnered with far-right GOP dirty tricksters and the founder of Citizens United in a smear campaign against Harry Reid;</li><li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">His spokesman worked to pass anti-immigrant English-only laws in an organization infested with fringe white supremacists, then served as chief-of-staff to one of the most corrupt Republicans in Congress, Chris Cannon, replacing Jack Abramoff’s partner-in-crime, David Safavian (who also was Grover Norquist’s business partner);</li><li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">His nonprofit "OUR America Initiative" was chartered and incorporated by Jim Lacy, one of the main promoters of birther conspiracy theories, who also backed violent racist Minutemen causes, and who runs one of the largest slate-mail operations in the country, essentially a mass elections fraud business to trick voters into voting for the wrong candidate;</li><li style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><b>The nonprofit papers that launched his campaign were filed by Maureen Otis, </b>a central figure in the Texas Minutemen extremist movement, who also worked with Alan Keyes on nonprofits that smeared Obama as a foreign-born Muslim; Otis is also a supporter of Romney and has called for people to donate to the Romney campaign;</li></ul><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">And finally — Gary Johnson was a corrupt governor who privatized his prisoners with gruesome results, who wants to privatize the federal government and strip us of anything that might protect us from the Kochs and the rest of the oligarchy, and dismantle all the social programs including Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, college grants, minimum wage laws, even child labor laws — and in return, he’ll let you smoke pot. If your state votes to legalize pot, that is. If your state still wants to put you in prison for smoking pot, or even stiffen those penalties, sucks for you.</p><p style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(55, 55, 55); background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">That’s not Gary Johnson’s problem.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">==</font></p></div>