Liberty Alliance
ntbcw am lib alliance
floyd brown?
==
Federal Election Commission Dismisses Complaint Against Jerry Falwell Ministries and Liberty Alliance
Jul 18, 2005
Lynchburg, VA - The Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) unanimously dismissed a complaint filed against Jerry Falwell Ministries and Liberty Alliance related to statements Dr. Falwell made in a "Falwell Confidential" email sent during the 2004 presidential election season. Dr. Falwell was represented before the FEC by Liberty Counsel President, Mathew D. Staver, and Anita L. Staver.
On July 1, 2004, Dr. Falwell sent a "Falwell Confidential" email urging people of faith to exercise their vote during the presidential election. In the email, Dr. Falwell stated, "For conservative people of faith, voting for principle this year means voting for the re-election of George W. Bush. The alternative, in my mind, is simply unthinkable." The email also urged supporters to contribute to the Campaign for Working Families Political Action Committee.
Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that Jerry Falwell Ministries ("JFM") and Liberty Alliance ("LA"), a lobbying organization, violated election laws by circulating an email that expressly advocated the election of a federal candidate and contained a solicitation for contributions to a PAC.
Liberty Counsel’s legal response argued that LA and JFM are covered by the press exemption. Dr. Falwell is the founder of Liberty Broadcasting Network, WTLU television station, the Liberty Channel cable network, and two radio stations, WRVL FM and WWMC FM. His “Old Time Gospel Hour” has been broadcast since 1956 and is the longest running, uninterrupted religious program in the nation. His “Falwell Confidential” is carried by WorldNetDaily and NewsMax. The response also argued that LA and JFM meet the "qualified nonprofit corporation" status because they are supported by private, rather than corporate, contributions. Finally, the response argued that the cost of disseminating the email was minimal. The FEC voted 6-0 to dismiss all allegations.
Mathew D. Staver, President and General Counsel of Liberty Counsel, stated, "Dr. Falwell does not lose his right to personal expression each election cycle. As a member of the media, the media outlets through which he communicates enjoy the protection of the First Amendment, just as much as The Washington Times." Dr. Falwell commented: "Religious nonprofit groups are not orphans to the First Amendment. I have been expressing my views on politics for five decades and am pleased with the FEC's ruling."
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. Gary Johnson isn’t Mormon.
The Salt Lake City Tribune also thought it was a little weird, so they asked about it in a story headlined"Ex-New Mexico guv bases his presidential campaign in — Utah?" which begins:
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.
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.
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 Orin Hatch and ex-witch and masturbation-denier Christine O’Donnell, as well as the Koch’s 'Reason' magazine. 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.
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....
According to documents filed with the state of Utah, the person responsible for filing the paperwork to register Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" is Maureen Otis, a Texas attorney with deep roots in the far-right Minutemen movement, and with Republican Party voter-suppression dirty tricks. Otis’s Texas law office is listed as the mailing address for Johnson’s "Our America Initiative."
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 Southern Poverty Law Center 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 Maureen Otis’s own private company, "American Caging," a company that specializes in "caging as the name implies.
"Caging" was used by Bush operatives to suppress the minority vote in 2000 and 2004. Slate offered this definition of vote "caging":
"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)."
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.
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?
Maureen Otis answered that question herself on her own twitter feed, such as this June 5 tweet followingScott Walker’s win in the Wisconsin recall:
"Great news for WI & start of an important trend for Repub's in the fall. Time for everyone to $$ to Romney campaign."
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.
The lawyer who incorporated the "Our America Initiative" charter documents, an A-list GOP dirty tricks operative from Orange County named Jim Lacy, also worked with and supported the same Minutemen outfits as Maureen Otis. 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.
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.
Lacy has been poisoning American politics since his radical-right college years when he was national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom. 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.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.
This summer, Jim Lacy opened up his bag of dirty tricks to get Gary Kreep get elected Superior Court judge. 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 boasts of his pro bono work for the Minutemen.
But Gary Kreep is just a warm-up act. 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, 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.
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. Their National Campaign Fund outfit produced some of the first "birther" conspiracy commercials, including
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.
And here is where the Gary Johnson third party Libertarian campaign begins to cross paths with these Republican dirty tricksters. As the first stimulus bill was being debated, Lacy and Brown announced another smear project, ExposeHarry.com, 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.
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 Jim Lacy, and is represented by far-right activist, "voter caging" specialist and Mitt Romney booster Maureen Otis.
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.
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.Johnson ran on a “law and order” platform, stiffening prison sentences (while recklessly privatizing the prisons), 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.
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.
The national media elites [fell?]for it, none worse than the aging Baby Boomers at Rolling Stone, whose Tim Dickson hailed Gary Johnson as "one of the more honest – and certainly more unorthodox – politicians in the running."
Back in New Mexico, reporters who were familiar with the...