Walker, Y

Americans for New Leadership & Liberty.com

Where:

NV-SEN, DE-SEN

Americans for New Leadership claims to have spent only $300,000 so far in ads attacking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and supporting his far-right opponent, Sharron Angle. After its first ad, the group was mocked for misspelling Sharron Angle's name. Although it did not air any ads in the Delaware primary, the organization’s website Liberty.com did create an infamous which said that Christine O’Donnell’s primary opponent Mike Castle has a male lover.

Who:

The Tea Party-backed group was founded by Tea Party activists Eric Odom and Yates Walker. Both worked on Christine O’Donnell's successful senatorial campaign against Mike Castle in Delaware’s GOP primary, where Walker served as her spokesman and Odom was involved in online organizing. Previously, Odom and Walker worked for Doug Hoffman’s failed 2009 campaign for Congress. A Tea Party activist, Odom is involved with a plethora of Tea Party groups: he founded the website TaxDayTeaParty.com and the American Liberty Bus Tour, and runs the Liberty First PAC and the American Liberty Alliance, a for-profit organization. Erik Erikson, founder of the prominent conservative blog RedState, criticized Odom’s “tangled web” of Tea Party organizations.

Republican activist and Fox News CommentatorDick Morris helped engineer the organization's growth. Morris asked viewers of *Hannity* and his email list to donate to Americans for New Leadership, and said in an email solicitation that "the campaign in Nevada to replace Harry Reid is in a desperate situation and needs your help.” Conservative activists Jen Harrington, who worked in the Bush administration, and Brent Husson, the former executive director of the Nevada Republican Party, are also managing the organization.

About:

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Spokesman Yates Walker told Politico that the group intends to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s Citizens Unitedruling: ��}:January���s Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which struck down the law banning corporate spending in elections, paved the way for the new group’s formation, Walker said.” The organization can also raise and spend unlimited amounts of money as an independent committee.

Calling itself the right-wing version of MoveOn.org, Americans for New Leadership is attempting to strengthen the conservative ���netroots” with its independent expenditure effort and website Liberty.com. Their website says that the organization’s mission is to “keep the American electorate informed and vigilantly guarding against the forces on the left who seek to redefine individual liberty, redistribute wealth, and remake America into a socialist, cradle-to-grave nanny state.” Moreover, the group decries the mainstream media as “infiltrated by the activist left” and says that the “fourth estate has become an accomplice to the progressive left’s assault on individual liberty.” It is focusing most of its resources on opposing Harry Reid’s reelection, and manages the website DumpReid.com.

Current attacks:

In a Liberty.com video, an anchorwoman criticizing Delaware Congressman and then-Senate candidate Mike Castle responds an anonymous questioner asking ��isn’t Mike Castle cheating on his wife with a man?�� by saying, “That’s the rumor.” Americans for New Leadership has launched two ads in Nevada. Their first ad not only originally misspelled Sharron Angle’s name, and also asserted that ��Sharron Angle won’t ‘phase-out’ Social Security��� and called the charge a “lie.” However, Angle explicitly said in a debate that “we need to phase-out Medicare and Social Security out in favor of something privatized” and that Social Security “can't be fixed.” In its second ad, Americans for New Leadership repeats the Medicare funding distortion and grossly misrepresents the stimulus plan and the American Clean Energy and Security Act.